[Gretl-devel] File formats

[Allin Cottrell]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> > As for openoffice, ODF support would be nice. Besides, it's a
> > well-documented xml format. However, this is the theory; in theory,
> > there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there
> > is. The gnumeric C file which contains the algorithm for reading odf
> > spreadsheets is a 115K gorilla. True, we don't need most of the stuff
> > they do (charts, styles and so on), but even ripping what we need from
> > their implementation would be quite a big task.
> 
> There must be some external library freely available, no?

I think we basically have what we need: routines for unzipping 
composite files (we have this for gretl session files), and 
routines for parsing XML (we're already linked to libxml2).

In fact, I think we can read ODS (and the Microsoft stuff too, if 
we want to) using a slightly modified version of the existing
gnumeric_import.c.  I'm not going to start on that before 1.6.6, 
but once that's out the door we could start on generalizing 
gnumeric_import to handle the other XML formats.

Allin.