Thanks for the responses - if I can reply to everyone at once:
Joao - thanks, rows looks good, but I'm trying to move away from Python
- I currently only need it for Excel handling
Kohei - yes, pretty much what I was expecting, thanks. Unfortunately, I
do need xls, for at least another year or so. The C libs I've looked
(briefly) at are:
xlnt (https://github.com/tfussell/xlnt) - looks good, but doesn't handle
xls, and it's not obvious that it can yet export csv files
OpenXLSX (https://github.com/troldal/OpenXLSX) - doesn't seem as mature
as xlnt; again, xlsx only, not obvious that it can export csv
Michael - good idea, at least in the short term. Both LibreOffice and
ssconvert (gnumeric) can handle my test spreadsheets and generate csv
output. I'm sticking with ssconvert at the moment, as I suspect that a
gnumeric headless install is (much?) less resource intensive than a
LibreOffice install and then running it headless (I need to run headless
on a server). I've covered this on SO at
https://serverfault.com/a/1099802/221197.
There are also other potential solutions - there are at least 3 program
called xlsx2csv, for example. All 3 are minimally documented and
probably don't work. I've tried the Python version, but can't persuade
it to produce anything other than floating-point output for times.
