Hello, Tika developers! I'm David Weekly, the founder of PBwiki. We're looking at using Tika to do text extraction for our internal search engine to help users search content uploaded to their wiki. Right now we use xls2csv and are looking to move to a more...sophisticated solution. Particularly one that can scrape useful strings from more parts of the document, like legends, axis & chart titles, etc.
So I was a little sad when I ran a sample Excel 2003 file (attached) that I made through Tika 0.3 (which was quite easy to build - awesome work!) and the output didn't correctly identify the sheets, did not include text from the first column of the first sheet, and did not include any supplementary text (e.g. titles for charts, legends, etc.) So this is part "bug report" (the columns of the first sheet should definitely be included!) and part query as to whether or not there is a plan w/Tika to extract more than sheet & cell data from documents. Specific issues with parsing xls.xls: (pardon the deliberately random names) - "charttabyodawg" (a chart sheet) improperly labeled as the sheet for data actually on Sheet1. - "Sheet1" data is actually the data on Sheet2 - Sheet2 is not mentioned. - Chart title for chart on "charttabyodawg" is "WhamPuff" and is not included in the output. - Chart title for inline chart on Sheet1 is "fizzlepuff" and is not included in output. - Y-axis for inline chart on Sheet1 is "whyaxis" and is not included in output. - X-axis for inline chart on Sheet1 is "eksaxis" and is not included in output. - Label for data in inline chart on Sheet1 is "YottaPuff" and is not included in output. Below is the output fromt Tika v0.3 when run on the attached XLS: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";> <head> <title/> </head> <body> <div class="page"> <h1>charttabyodawg</h1> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td>1</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td> </tr> <tr> <td>300</td> <td/> <td/> <td>1</td> </tr> <tr> <td>baz</td> <td/> <td/> <td>2</td> <td/> <td>9</td> </tr> <tr> <td>yadda yam</td> <td/> <td/> <td>300</td> <td/> <td>5</td> </tr> <tr> <td/> <td/> <td/> <td/> <td/> <td>16</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> <div class="page"> <h1>Sheet1</h1> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td/> </tr> <tr> <td/> </tr> <tr> <td/> </tr> <tr> <td/> </tr> <tr> <td/> <td/> <td>dingdong</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </body> </html> I hope this kind of message is seen as helpful and constructive and not redundant (I did check Jira for similar issues) or whiny or non-specific. Yours, David Weekly
xls.xls
Description: MS-Excel spreadsheet
