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Excel::Text::Template cpan:TBROWDER last updated on 2020-04-11

THIS MODULE IS DEPRECATED. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY MODULE "Excel"

Excel::Text::Template

Use a text template to generate an Excel *.xlsx file

DESCRIPTION

This module provides the capability of using a text template to generate an Excel file. It is a WIP and has no working code at the moment. If you are interested in the concept, please star the project, follow it, and file a feature request issue.

The project will use several Perl modules which will have to be installed for the distro to work (I use cpanm for that):

• Perl modules required:

  • Excel::Writer::XLSX
  • Spreadsheet::XLSX

GENESIS

This project started when I was trying to automate creating forms for my tax return. I have a need to generate multiple workbooks, one worksheet per workbook, from a template, and am designing my own format for that purpose. I will use the Raku language to parse the text-file template, then, with the aid of the Raku module Inline::Perl5, I will read my xlsx data files with one of the Perl xlsx readers and then use this module to write new, filtered files in the form of the template.

I am just starting, but I'm looking at a template format something like this, one line per row, cells separated by pipes (|), key/value attribute pairs (using a syntax similar to Raku) following the cell content:

``` Raku

This is a comment. The following row describes one xlsx row with four columns (the

first column being empty) and it has an ending comment.

Comments are stripped to the end-of-line eol before parsing the row.

| some text | 5.26 | ="some formula" :color(red) :width(2) # comment...

empty rows are ignored, the worksheet will have all rows padded with empty cells

to the maximum number of cells found on any row

another comment and more rows following

| # this is a row with two empty cells ```

I plan to use Raku's grammar to parse the template file.

AUTHOR

Tom Browder, <[email protected]m> (tbrowder on IRC #raku)

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2020 Tom Browder, all rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it or modify it under the same terms as Raku itself.

See that license here.