retrieving and parsing an excel spreadsheet

[Paul]

I want to retrieve an excel spreadsheet (eventually several at
different locations) and display the contents in a web page.
if i copy the file locally ive got everything working as expected.I
cant retrieve the file and do the same though.

if i do this with a local file it works

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
use DateTime::Format::Excel;
use Data::Dumper;
use Date::Manip;
use Statistics::Descriptive::Discrete ;
use Storable;
use LWP::Simple;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;
print $q->header;
print $q->start_html();#

$file='/tmp/data.xls';
die "Couldn't get excel file " unless defined $file;
my $cell;my $row;my $sheet;my $col;my $excel;
$excel = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse($file) or die ("cant
open file");
etc etc

if i do this it doesnt display

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
use DateTime::Format::Excel;
use Data::Dumper;
use Date::Manip;
#use Date::Calc;# qw(Week_of_Year);
use Statistics::Descriptive::Discrete ;
use Storable;
use LWP::Simple;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;
print $q->header;
print $q->start_html();#

my $url = "http://intranet/.<blah>.xls";
my $file =get $url;
die "Couldn't get excel file " unless defined $file;
my $cell;my $row;my $sheet;my $col;my $excel;
$excel = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook->Parse($file) or die ("cant
open file");

the original file when copied is

-rwxrwxrwx 1 paul paul 58880 2009-12-15 08:47 data.xls

if i get it and save it , it is different

my $url = "http://blah .xls";
my $file = get $url;
open (F, '>/tmp/data.xls');
print F $file;
close (F);

-rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 59392 2009-12-21 18:18 data.xls

is there a way to automatically retrieve the excel file as i wish ( so
that changes to the excel spreadshet are automatically updated in the
web page .

Excel will open the the downloaded file as well as from the intranet
and they look identical in excel

doing a diff just says the binary files are different.

what am i doing wrong ?

[C.DeRykus]

Just a guess but the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel doc has a version
warning.
Did you see this:

Note: Versions of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel prior to 0.50 also
documented
a Workbook parse() method as a syntactic shortcut for the above
new()
and parse() combination. This is now deprecated since it breaks
error
handling.

Also, the documented error() method may provide more helpful messages
if the file's unparseable:

my $parser = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
my $workbook = $parser->parse('Book1.xls');

if ( !defined $workbook ) {
die $parser->error(), ".\n";
}

--
Charles DeRykus