Re: Trying to get a RPG program to read a xlsx

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For all the good Scott's API is - and it's most excellent - I've wondered
about reading the XLSX directly. It is, after all, just a ZIP'd file of a
bunch of XML files.

[...]

Personally I don't think this would be all that hard to read with, and it'd
be a lot faster than all those individual Java calls from RPG.

It would indeed perform a lot faster. But it's kind of tricky and
annoying to program. In concept, it sounds very reasonable. In
practice, very few people tackle this head-on and wind up with a
finished .xlsx-reading library (in any programming language!), because
almost everyone who tries eventually discovers that Excel's quirks
make it much easier to reuse (or at worst, build upon) someone else's
wheel rather than inventing a new one.

And RPG is already at a disadvantage relative to other languages
because its XML and IFS handling are comparatively clumsy, tedious,
and rudimentary.

John Y.