read.gnumeric.sheet: Read data from a gnumeric (or MS Excel, Openoffice Calc,...

In gnumeric: Read Data from Files Readable by 'gnumeric'

Read data from a gnumeric (or MS Excel, Openoffice Calc, Xbase, Quatro Pro, Paradox, HTML, etc) spreadsheet or database file using ssconvert from the gnumeric distribution

Description

Read data from a sheet of a gnumeric (or other common spreadsheet or database) file to a data.frame.

Requires an external program, ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ (normally installed with gnumeric) in ‘⁠PATH⁠’. See vignette ‘⁠install-ssconvert.html⁠’ for details.

Calls ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ to convert the input to CSV. ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ can read several file formats (see Details below).

Note: During conversion to CSV ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ also evaluates formulas (e.g. ‘⁠=sum(A1:A3)⁠’) in cells, and emits the result instead of the formula.

‘⁠read.gnumeric.range⁠’ just calls ‘⁠read.gnumeric.sheet⁠’, but uses different default values for its arguments: by default drops no rows or columns and requires at least the bottom left corner of requested gnumeric cell range to be provided.

Usage

  read.gnumeric.sheet(file,
                      head=FALSE,
                      sheet.name='Sheet1',
                      top.left='A1',
                      bottom.right=NA,
                      drop.empty.rows="bottom",
                      drop.empty.columns="right",
                      colnames.as.sheet=FALSE,
                      rownames.as.sheet=colnames.as.sheet,
                      quiet=TRUE,
                      LANG='C',
                      locale='C',
                      import.encoding=NA,
                      field.format='automatic',
                      ...
                     );

  read.gnumeric.range(file,
       head=FALSE,
       sheet.name='Sheet1',
       top.left='A1',
       bottom.right,
       drop.empty.rows="none",
       drop.empty.columns="none",
       colnames.as.sheet=FALSE,
       rownames.as.sheet=colnames.as.sheet,
       quiet=TRUE,
       LANG='C',
       locale='C',
       import.encoding=NA,
       field.format='automatic',
       ...
       );

Arguments

file	Name of gnumeric file (or other file type readable by gnumeric) to read from. This may also be an URL, i.e. like 'http://example.com/path/file.gnumeric'
head	When TRUE, use first row of requested gnumeric sheet range as column names in the resulting data.frame
sheet.name	Name of sheet as appears in gnumeric. Sheet names containing space or hyphen characters do not work (ssconvert reports 'Invalid range specified'). sheet.name=NA Omits sheet name from the ssconvert command line. For gnumeric files this will read the sheet that was 'current' in gnumeric when the file was saved.
top.left	Top left corner of requested gnumeric sheet range, e.g. 'A1'
bottom.right	Bottom right corner of requested gnumeric sheet range. The default for read.gnumeric.sheet is NA: with top.left='A1' or top.left=NA this means read full sheet. If top.left is not 'A1' or NA (i.e. when reading partial sheet), then the interpretation of bottom.right=NA falls back to 'IV65536': this causes a lot of unused lines to be printed by ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ then parsed by read.csv, thus you might want to override it to speed up reading. Use read.gnumeric.sheet.info to read actual bottom.right cell name from a gnumeric file (but not other formats).
drop.empty.rows	One of c('none','top','bottom','both','all'). 'all' drops all empty lines from the requested range, even those that are between two non-empty rows. 'both' drops empty lines below the last non-empty row and above the first non-empty. 'top', 'bottom' and 'none' as you would expect.
drop.empty.columns	One of c('none','left','right','both','all') Similar to drop.empty.rows, but for columns.
colnames.as.sheet	Rename columns to 'A', 'B', 'C', ... to have names corresponding to gnumeric column names.
rownames.as.sheet	Rename rows to '1', '2', '3', ... to have names corresponding to gnumeric row indices. Note: this means df['1',], not df[1,] in the result (rownames are strings, not integers). Note: when deciding row names only top.left and head are accounted for, but not e.g. skip (which may be passed to read.csv via ...).
quiet	When TRUE, do not print command executed, and (on unix platforms) also redirect stderr of the external program ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ to /dev/null
LANG	Under unix, passed to ssconvert in the environment variable 'LANG'. The default value ('C') is intended to avoid using decimal comma in the emitted CSV file. It is probably always overridden by the locale argument.
locale	Passed to ssconvert -O "locale=C" The default value ('C') is intended to avoid using decimal comma in the emitted CSV file.
import.encoding	If not NA, passed to ssconvert as its --import-encoding parameter.
field.format	Passed to ssconvert -O "format=value". Allowed values: "raw", "automatic", "preserve". "raw" emits date and datetime values as number of days since an (unspecified) epoch. E.g.: as.numeric(as.character(x))+as.Date('1899-12-30') might work for date values and as.POSIXct(as.numeric(as.character(x))*(60*60*24), origin="1899-12-29 23:59:59", tz='UTC') might work for datetime values. See help(as.Date) for some comments on Excel epoch values.
...	Extra arguments, passed to read.csv

Details

Data from the gnumeric file is dumped as .csv using the ‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ program provided with gnumeric.

‘⁠ssconvert⁠’ supports several input formats, thus the input file does not have to be a gnumeric file. The formats supported may be listed with

    ssconvert --list-importers
  

from a shell prompt.

For me this prints (with ssconvert version '1.8.4')

ID                           | Description
Gnumeric_xbase:xbase         | Xbase (*.dbf) file format
Gnumeric_Excel:excel         | MS Excel (tm) (*.xls)
Gnumeric_Excel:xlsx          | MS Excel (tm) 2007
Gnumeric_html:html           | HTML (*.html, *.htm)
Gnumeric_oleo:oleo           | GNU Oleo (*.oleo)
Gnumeric_applix:applix       | Applix (*.as)
Gnumeric_QPro:qpro           | Quattro Pro (*.wb1, *.wb2, *.wb3)
Gnumeric_paradox:paradox     | Paradox database or
                             | primary index file
Gnumeric_sc:sc               | SC/xspread
Gnumeric_XmlIO:sax           | Gnumeric XML (*.gnumeric)
Gnumeric_lotus:lotus         | Lotus 123 (*.wk1, *.wks, *.123)
Gnumeric_XmlIO:dom           | Gnumeric XML (*.gnumeric) Old
                             |   slow importer
Gnumeric_dif:dif             | Data Interchange Format (*.dif)
Gnumeric_Excel:excel_xml     | MS Excel (tm) 2003 SpreadsheetML
Gnumeric_OpenCalc:openoffice | Open/Star Calc (*.sxc, *.ods)
Gnumeric_plan_perfect:pln    | Plan Perfect Format (PLN) import
Gnumeric_sylk:sylk           | MultiPlan (SYLK)
Gnumeric_mps:mps             | Linear and integer program (*.mps)
                             |   file format
Gnumeric_stf:stf_csvtab      | Comma or tab separated
                             |   values (CSV/TSV)
Gnumeric_stf:stf_assistant   | Text import (configurable)
  

But the actual list may depend on which import plugins are installed for gnumeric.

Format	Source	Status
.gnumeric	gnumeric	works
.xls	gnumeric	works
.html	gnumeric ‘⁠[Save as / HTML 4.0]⁠’	works
.html	Openoffice Calc ‘⁠[Save as/HTML Document]⁠’	works
.ods	Openoffice Calc	works
Other formats		not tested

See Also

read.gnumeric.range for a variant with default arguments more suited for reading an exact cell range of a sheet.

read.gnumeric.sheet.info to read actual bottom.right cell name from a gnumeric file (but not other formats).

read.gnumeric.sheets to read all sheets from a gnumeric file (but not other formats).

read.xlsx, read_xlsx and read_xls for reading Microsoft Excel files

read.DIF for reading Data Interchange Format (DIF) files.

read.dbf for Xbase (.dbf) files.

Examples

## Read all data from 'Sheet1'
## Not run: 
df <- read.gnumeric.sheet( file="file.gnumeric" );

df <- read.gnumeric.sheet( file="file.gnumeric",
                           sheet.name='Sheet1' );



## Read from Excel sheet named 'Sheet3' the range C3:D50,
## rename columns to 'C' and 'D', rows to '3' ... '50',
## then drop all empty rows.
##
df<-read.gnumeric.sheet( "file.xls",
                          sheet.name='Sheet3',
                          top.left='C3',
                          bottom.right='D50',
                          drop.empty.rows="all",
                          drop.empty.columns="none",
                          colnames.as.sheet=TRUE
                         )


## Read from "file.gnumeric", 'Sheet1' data in 'A1:E100',
## Use first row (of selected range) as column names.
## Drop empty rows and columns from bottom and right.
df<-read.gnumeric.sheet("file.gnumeric", head=TRUE,
                         bottom.right='E100')


## Why does it not work? Set quiet=FALSE to see
## the command executed (and on unix, diagnostic
## messages from ssconvert).
df<-read.gnumeric.sheet( "file.ods", quiet=FALSE )

## End(Not run)

gnumeric documentation built on Oct. 18, 2023, 5:10 p.m.