ANNOUNCE: xlrd 0.5.2 -- extract data from Excel spreadsheets

[John Machin]

On 20/03/2006 10:37 PM, jcmendez wrote:
> Exactly.

Yes, your requirement is exactly that, a list of references.


>  Once I get the formulas, I can do a weak parsing of them and
> find the references.
> 

A formula is not stored as input e.g. "(A1+A2)*3.0+$Z$29"; it's kept as 
an RPN stream of variable-length tokens. You don't need to parse it in 
the sense you were probably thinking of; *ALL* [ho ho chuckle chuckle] 
you need to do is step through the tokens and do something with the ones 
that contain references. Have a peek at this: 
http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf -- formulas are covered in 
40+ pages starting at about page 25.

Cheers,
John