Install perl modules needed for read.xls to support Excel 2007+ XLSX format
installXLSXsupport(perl = "perl", verbose = FALSE)Either TRUE indicating that the necessary perl modules have
been successfully installed, or FALSE indicating that an error
has occured.
Path to perl interpreter (optional).
If TRUE, show additional messages during
processing.
Excel file support is deprecated in gdata version 2.19.0, to be
removed in the near future. At the user level, the functions
installXLSXsupport, read.xls, sheetCount,
sheetNames, xls2csv, xls2sep, xls2tab,
xls2tsv, and xlsFormats now raise a warning about the
functionality being deprecated.
Excel file support was first introduced in gregmisc/gdata 1.11.0 back in 2004, but today we have packages such as openxlsx, readxl, XLConnect, and xlsx offering dedicated Excel file support with more features. When Excel file support will be removed from the gdata package, it will result in lighter package maintenance and no more Perl warnings on the user side.
This function calls the perl script 'install_modules.pl' located in the perl subdirectory of the gdata package directory (or inst/perl in the source package). This perl script attempts to use the perl 'CPAN' package, which should be included as part of most perl installations, to automatically download, compile, and install the Compress::Raw::Zlib and Spreadsheet::XLSX perl modules needed for read.xls to support support Excel 2007+ XLSX files into the gdata perl subdirectory.
Since the perl modules are installed into the gdata installation
directory, the perl modules will be available until the gdata package
is replaced or removed. Since this occurs each time a new version of
gdata is installed, installXLSXsupport will need to be run each
time a new version of the gdata package is installed.
Further, the binary Compress::Raw::Zlib package installed by
installXLSXsupport is tied to the particular version of perl
used to compile it, therefore, you will need to re-run
installXLSXsupport if you install a different perl
distribution.
This installation process will fail if 1) perl is not available on the
search path and the perl argument is not used to specify the
path of the perl executable, 2) the perl installation is not properly
configured for installing binary packages*, 3) if the CPAN module is
not present, or 4) if the C compiler specified by the perl
installation is not present.
In particular, installXLSXsupport will fail for the
version of perl included with the current RTools.zip package, which is
not correctly configured to allow installation of additional perl
packages. (The RTools version of perl is installed in a different
directory than the perl configuration files expect.)
The function xlsFormats can be used to see whether XLS and XLSX
formats are supported by the currently available perl modules.
read.xls, xls2csv, xlsFormats
if (FALSE) {
installXLSXsupport()
}
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