From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2011-01-21T08:15:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Read spreadsheet from internet

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On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Henry Oss <oss.hcs@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I am probably no longer justified in claiming to a newbie, but I suspect
> this is a newbie question.
>
> I am using the spreadsheet gem and I need to open a spreadsheet for
> which I have a URL.  Following
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/263536/open-an-io-stream-from-a-local-file-or-url
> I have done the following:
>
> web_contents  = open(url) {|f| f.read }
> book = Spreadsheet.open web_contents
>
> And I am getting:
>
> /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/spreadsheet-0.6.5.1/lib/spreadsheet.rb:68:in
> `initialize': string contains null byte (ArgumentError)
>  from
>
> /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/spreadsheet-0.6.5.1/lib/spreadsheet.rb:68:in
> `open'
>  from
>
> /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/spreadsheet-0.6.5.1/lib/spreadsheet.rb:68:in
> `open'
>
> What am I doing wrong?
>
> Henry
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>
I'm not familiar with the gem, but your web_contents looks like it is a
string of the actual contents of the file, ie the file in memory in a
variable, as a string.

The Spreadsheet.open, however, looks like it expects maybe a path to the
spreadsheet to open. That is probably where the issue lies, so we take a
quick glance at the docs (
http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/Spreadsheet.html#method-c-open), which
reveals that it takes an IO object, or a string as a path to the
spreadsheet. You give it a string, so it thinks that is the path to the
file, but it is actually the contents of the document.

How to resolve this? Instead of reading the contents of f, pass f (an IO
object) to Spreadsheet.open. So, if I've analyzed this correctly, I would
expect this code to resolve the issue:

book = nil
open url do |f|
  book = Spreadsheet.open f
end

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