How can I print sheetnames of a spreadsheet using Linux command-line?

Question

I am aware of using in2csv to save a particular worksheet as a .csv:

in2csv --sheet "sheet name" file1.xls > sheet-name.csv

But are there any other tools to just print the sheetnames?

Perhaps there are options with Perl?

Answer 1

in2csv from the csvkit package provides the --names or -n option for that: ^[Source]

 -n, --names     Display sheet names from the input Excel file.

In your example the command would be:

in2csv -n file1.xls

This feature was added in csvkit 1.0.2, which is not available from the official package sources for releases older than Bionic. If you’re running Xenial you need to either

• compile the program from source or

• install it via pip with

  sudo pip install csvkit
  

to get the latest version.

Answer 2

in2csv is the simpler option, but I'll leave this in case somebody might find it useful. There's a nice command called xlhtml for converting XLS files to HTML or XML. And once you have the XML, various XML processing tools can be used to do a wide variety of queries on it. In this case:

$ xlhtml -xml ~/foo.xls | xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//pagetitle' -v . -n
Sheet1
Sheet2

The XML that xlhtml generates is like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<excel_workbook>
    <sheets>
        <sheet>
            <page>0</page>
            <pagetitle>Sheet1</pagetitle>
            <firstrow>0</firstrow>
            <lastrow>11</lastrow>
            <firstcol>0</firstcol>
            <lastcol>0</lastcol>

So, for the sheet names, we can query the pagetitle nodes, for which I used xmlstarlet.