Question

I have a three columns Excel file,which has the following pattern

12   A    P1  
23   B    P5
24   C    P2
15   D    P1
06   E    P5

The structure underlying this data set is that,
P1 contains A and D; A corresponds to 12 and D corresponds to 15
P2 contains C; C corresponds to 24
P5 contains B and E; B corresponds to 23 and E corresponds to 06

I want to represent this kind of structure in a hashed structure i.e., use P1 as a key to point to a hash, and A is used as the key for this second level hash. Is there a way to implement this in Perl?

Answer 1

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel can be used to parse .xls files. Below is a sample program that builds the desired data structure.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;

my $parser    = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new;
my $workbook  = $parser->parse( shift or die "Please provide a file\n" );
my $worksheet = $workbook->worksheet(0);

my %data;
for my $row ( 0 .. $worksheet->row_range ) {
    my $value     = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, 0 )->value;
    my $key       = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, 1 )->value;
    my $super_key = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, 2 )->value;
    $data{$super_key}->{$key} = $value;
}

print Dumper \%data;

Output

$VAR1 = {
          'P5' => {
                    'E' => '06',
                    'B' => '23'
                  },
          'P2' => {
                    'C' => '24'
                  },
          'P1' => {
                    'A' => '12',
                    'D' => '15'
                  }
        };