I'm buffaloed by a seemingly related problem I just encountered.

I have a program I wrote about 3 years ago (and have updated since
then) that pulls in some number of Excel XLS files, parses out
variable-sized rectangles of cells, pulls those into a J array for
further processing, and eventually writes an SQLite file.  I've
packaged all that up as a standalone program, so it doesn't change
easily without my rerunning Inno Setup.

It's worked up to as recently as 2012-07-25, judging by the timestamp
on the current sqlite file. I'm running

   9!:14 ''
j602/2008-03-03/16:45

and tables/tara 1.2.17. Pacman shows no packages in need of updating.

When I try to run it today, I get an error.  Running it from a command
in an ijx shell gives me "readxlsheets: file not found' plus a
wdhandler dialog box that includes

index error: readexcel_biffread_
variable =: 'SHEET' readexcel"1 (_1&}.) DDIRold,"1 FNAME

where FNAME is an unboxed 12 by 14 array of FQFNs (and, yes, I do
intend to drop one of the names).

The files all exist:

   fexist"1 (_1&}.)DDIRold,"1 FNAME
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

I saw the jpath issue between tara and other verbs, but I don't think
that's the problem, as each file name starts with b:, ends with .xls,
and has all the intervening directories, file names, and slashes in
between.

According to Windows Explorer, nothing has changed in those XLS files
since June 26, 2012 for one file and since 2011 or before for the
others.  I repeated the test just on one file that hasn't changed
since 2008 and get the same result.  According to Emacs Dired, the J
scripts haven't changed since November 4, 2011.

The only things I can think of that are left as possible changes are J
packages or Windows XP.  If I understand
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/JAL/Build%20Log, there have been no
updates to tara since July 25.

So I suspect I'm over-thinking this.  Has anyone seen anything related
to this?  Has anyone made a change that might account for this
behavior?  Should I just jump into debug and see what I can suss out?
Is there something better than biffread to check out?

Thanks,

Bill
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Reply via email to