I encountered some XLS files that fail to be parsed by a number of tools (xlrd, pandas, openpyxl, calamine).

The files appear to be in XML format with the following properties:

• Workbook
• Worksheet
• Table
• Row
• Cell
• Data
• Styles
• Style
• NumberFormat
• Font
• Alignment

It is unclear what makes the files unreadable by XLS and XLSX parsers.

This project reads XLS consisting only of the above properties (XML formatted document) and emits a best-effort TSV.

bash $ cp /path/to/file.xls input.xls $ cargo run > out.tsv $ less -S out.tsv

How?

It's just a serde specification, using serde-xml-rs.

Expect to modify the code if your source document contains anything other than the properties defined above.