Question

I have a excel file (xls) and I want to show that data in charts on a web page.

I can save the file as a xml document in Excel but i don’t now how to parse it.

$(document).ready(function() {
    $.ajax({
        url: "data.xml",
        type: "GET",
        dataType: "xml",
        success: function(xml){
            parseXml(xml);
        }
    });
});

function parseXml(xml)
{
    var xml = $(xml);
    var data = xml.find("Worksheet").children('table').children('row').children('Cell');
    console.log(data);
}

This works “kind of” but to get the right values is hard.

For example, if I want to get the Net Sales which looks like this in the xml document:

    <Row>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s44">
            <Data ss:Type="String">Net sales</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">11779.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">10996.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s46"/>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">10222.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s46"/>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">11636.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">10918.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s42"/>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">10231.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">9649.0</Data>
        </Cell>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s46"/>
        <Cell ss:StyleID="s45">
            <Data ss:Type="Number">10871.0</Data>
        </Cell>
    </Row>

Answer 1

Since jQuery 1.5, there’s built-in support for parsing an XML string to a jQuery object. Just use jQuery.parseXML and then you can query the resulting jQuery object just as if it were a DOM.

Due to the same origin policy (see HTTP access control on MDC) I was prevented from doing a cross-browser GET, so I had to copy the the source code from your XML file and put it in a textarea.

Could be be that any escaping you had in there was lost because I am getting a parse error. The attribute ss:Format contains an invalid value:

_-* #,##0.00\ _k_r_-;\-* #,##0.00\ _k_r_-;_-* "-"??\ _k_r_-;_-@_-

I removed this value, and it worked like a charm! See my test case on jsFiddle.