from fods

[double-daruma]

Related problem

from ods is already supported. it would me nice if flat, non compressed ods files would also be supported.

Describe the solution you'd like

A from fods command or make from ods accept non compressed ods files or have a flat for from ods

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context and details

No response

[fdncred]

i've never seen one. what do they look like?

[Taywee]

ODS is a zip file of mostly XML files.

FODS (Officially "OpenDocument Spreadsheet Flat XML") is a single uncompressed unarchived XML file representing the same data in mostly the same format. All binary data is embedded, and all documents are compiled into a single one.

I use this sometimes for spreadsheets that I version control with Git and regularly update. The diffs aren't pretty, but they're a bit better than binary blobs.

[sholderbach]

Thanks for the explainer @Taywee

For our Excel/ODS loading we use the calamine crate. The main entry point we use to parse ods directly includes the zip unpacking step. I think they have a lot of the code that would be needed for the XML parsing internally. So if you want to have this functionality @double-daruma I think it would be best to raise it with them to add an entry point that implements the FODS spec and reuses the general ODS parsing.

On the nushell side of things, the question for the rarer file types will always be: Should this be included out of the box or should this be a plugin. But as the heavy weight of the whole spreadsheet format parsing is done by one crate this favors keeping all of them together in my view.