Apache Ant/Converting Excel to XML

Motivation You want to automatically extract a well-formed XML file from a binary Excel document. Method We will us the java Ant task within a build target. Input File We will create a sample Microsoft Excel file that has two columns like the following: center|Screen image for spreadsheet input Save this into a file 'sample.xls'. Next, download the Apache Tika jar file and put is on your local hard drive. You can get the downloads from here: http://tika.apache.org/download.html the Main Tika jar file is about 27MB. I put the tika jar file in D:\Apps\tika but you can change this. Create a file called "build.xml" Sources <project name="extract-xml-from-xsl" default="extract-xml-from-xsl"> <description>Sample Extract XML from Excel xsl file with Apache Tika</description> <property name="lib.dir" value="D:\Apps\tika"/> <property name="input-file" value="sample.xls"/> <target name="extract-xml-from-xsl"> <echo message="Extracting XML from Excel file: ${input-file}"/> <java jar="${lib.dir}/tika-app-1.3.jar" fork="true" failonerror="true" maxmemory="128m" input="${input-file}" output="sample.xml"> <arg value="-x" /> </java> </target> </project> The <java> task will run tika. The argument "-x" (for XML will extract the XML from the input. Other command line options are listed here: http://tika.apache.org/1.3/gettingstarted.html Now open your DOS or UNIX shell and cd into the place with your build file. Type "ant" into a command shell. Run $ ant Buildfile: D:\ws\doc-gen\trunk\build\tika\build.xml extract-xml-from-xsl: [echo] Extracting XML from Excel file: sample.xls BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 1 second Sample Output Note that the output is a well formed HTML file with a table in it: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta name="meta:last-author" content="Dan" /> <meta name="meta:creation-date" content="2013-03-04T17:20:19Z" /> <meta name="dcterms:modified" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <meta name="meta:save-date" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <meta name="Last-Author" content="Dan" /> <meta name="Application-Name" content="Microsoft Excel" /> <meta name="dc:creator" content="Dan" /> <meta name="Last-Modified" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <meta name="Author" content="Dan" /> <meta name="dcterms:created" content="2013-03-04T17:20:19Z" /> <meta name="date" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <meta name="modified" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <meta name="creator" content="Dan" /> <meta name="Creation-Date" content="2013-03-04T17:20:19Z" /> <meta name="meta:author" content="Dan" /> <meta name="extended-properties:Application" content="Microsoft Excel" /> <meta name="Content-Type" content="application/vnd.ms-excel" /> <meta name="Last-Save-Date" content="2013-03-04T17:22:01Z" /> <title></title> </head> <body> <div class="page"><h1>Sheet1</h1> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td>Name</td> <td>Phone</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Peg</td> <td>123</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Dan</td> <td>456</td> </tr> <tr> <td>John</td> <td>789</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Sue</td> <td>912</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </html>