path to the Microsoft Excel file. Supports "http://", "https://", and "ftp://" URLS.
logical flag indicating whether details should be printed as the file is processed.
name of the perl executable to be called.
a character vector of strings which are to be interpreted as 'NA' values. See read.table for details.
logical flag indicating whether blank lines in the orginal file should be ignored.
additional arguments to read.table. The defaults for read.csv() are used.
This function works translating the named Microsoft Excel file into a temporary .csv or .tab file, using the xls2csv or xls2tab Perl script installed as part of this (gdata) package.
Caution: In the conversion to csv, strings will be quoted. This can be problem if you are trying to use the comment.char option of read.table since the first character of all lines (including comment lines) will be "\"" after conversion.
If you have quotes in your data which confuse the process you may wish to use read.xls(..., quote = ''). This will cause the quotes to be regarded as data and you will have to then handle the quotes yourself after reading the file in.
Caution: If you call "xls2csv" directly, is your responsibility to close and delete the file after using it.
"read.xls" returns a data frame.
"xls2sep" returns a temporary file in the specified format. "xls2csv" and "xls2tab" are simply wrappers for "xls2sep" specifying method as "csv" or "tab", respectively.
Either a working version of Perl must be present in the executable search path, or the exact path of the perl executable must be provided via the perl argument. See the examples below for an illustration.
if( 'XLSX' %in% xlsFormats() )  ## if XLSX is supported..