@silencesys/xlsx-to-xml

XLSX to XML

This little tool converts two column XLSX Excel files to XML.

How to use

1. Install this package with NPM

npm install -g @silencesys/xlsx-to-xml

2. Create config file that will be used for the transformation
3. Run the tool

xlsx-to-xml --input your_input_file.xlsx --output your_output_file.xml --config your_config.json

Available options

Option	Description
--input, -i	The input file to be converted to xlsx
--output, -o	The output file to be created
--config, -c	The config file that will be used
--dirty	Set this flag if you want to see XHTML tags added by XLSX transformer
--ignore-halves	Set this flag if you want to ignore rows that has one column empty
--help, -h	Show help

Config file

The config file is a standard JSON file with following structure:

{
  "parentTagName": "dictionary",
  "rowTagName": "entry",
  "language": ["eng", "cze"],
  "stripTags": [
    "<span style=\"font-size:12pt;\">"
  ],
  "replaceTags": [
    {
      "from": "<span style=\"font-size:9pt;\">",
      "to": "<note>"
    },
  ],
  "divideBy": [
    [": "]
  ]
}

As you can see there are several options that can be used. There is no default config file as each use case is expected to be unique. You can use aforementioned snippet as your default config file.

Option	Required	Description
parentTagName	Yes	Name of the parent tag.
rowTagName	Yes	Name of the row tag.
language	Optional	List of languages that should be used.
stripTags	Optional	List of tags that should be stripped from the text. The list should contain only opening tags with all their attributes that should be removed.
replaceTags	Optional	List of tags that should be replaced. These tags should always be defined as a JSON object containing keys from and to. Only opening tags but with all attributes should be defined there.
divideBy	Optional	List of strings that should be used to divide the text. You might want to include spaces following after these characters as the division method is quite dumb.

How to write a config file

I'm sure you ask how am I supposed to know which XHTML tags will be used in my XLSX document after conversion. Well, for that purpose there is a very simple way. Just run following command:

xlsx-to-xml --input your_input_file.xlsx --dirty

This will output a dirty file containing XML with all XHTML tags. You can then decide which tags should be stripped or replaced and which should be kept. Just keep in mind that tags <dirty-list> and <dirty-row> are added by this tool and will be replaced by parentTagName and rowTagName respectively.

Contributing

All the code is open source and you can contribute to the project by creating pull requests.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.