File not found with xls2csv, segfault with readxl

[jennybc]

tidyverse/readxl#417

xls from here

https://www.seco.admin.ch/dam/seco/de/dokumente/Wirtschaft/Wirtschaftslage/VIP%20Quartalsschätzungen/qna_p_na.xls.download.xls/qna_p_na.xls

With xls2csv:

jenny@2015-mbp libxls-evanmiller-github $ ./xls2csv ~/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls
FILE: /Users/jenny/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls
File not found

With readxl:

> library(readxl)
> read_excel("~/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls")

 *** caught segfault ***
address 0x0, cause 'memory not mapped'

Traceback:
 1: .Call(`_readxl_read_xls_`, path, sheet_i, limits, shim, col_names,     col_types, na, trim_ws, guess_max)
 2: read_fun(path = path, sheet_i = sheet, limits = limits, shim = shim,     col_names = col_names, col_types = col_types, na = na, trim_ws = trim_ws,     guess_max = guess_max)
 3: tibble::as_tibble(read_fun(path = path, sheet_i = sheet, limits = limits,     shim = shim, col_names = col_names, col_types = col_types,     na = na, trim_ws = trim_ws, guess_max = guess_max), validate = FALSE)
 4: tibble::repair_names(tibble::as_tibble(read_fun(path = path,     sheet_i = sheet, limits = limits, shim = shim, col_names = col_names,     col_types = col_types, na = na, trim_ws = trim_ws, guess_max = guess_max),     validate = FALSE), prefix = "X", sep = "__")
 5: read_excel_(path = path, sheet = sheet, range = range, col_names = col_names,     col_types = col_types, na = na, trim_ws = trim_ws, skip = skip,     n_max = n_max, guess_max = guess_max, format = format)
 6: read_excel("~/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls")

[jennybc]

Hmmm ... rebuilding xls2csv with 6218a25, I still struggle to read this file:

jenny@2015-mbp libxls-evanmiller-github $ ./xls2csv ~/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls
FILE: /Users/jenny/Downloads/qna_p_na.xls
Error reading XLS file: Unable to allocate memory

I can read it with Excel fwiw. But I note that all the sheets appear to be protected.

[evanmiller]

The file is failing because libxls thinks the SST table is too large (1.8B entries). There's likely a bug in the code.

Did this file work in older versions of libxls?

[jennybc]

Did this file work in older versions of libxls?

No, it did not. The person who opened the issue suggests it can be read by a different R package, but there's a typo in the package name and AFAIK that package can only read xlsx. So hard to know what that actually means. Lots of xls problems go away if you open in Excel and resave 🙂 esp to xlsx.

We can let this one go.