How to Convert a Spreadsheet Into a DokuWiki Table

Remember that article I wrote about how TSV is the best format for spreadsheets? Well, here’s some more proof:

Earlier today I needed to convert a spreadsheet in XLS format into a table in DokuWiki. I’ve been avoiding using tables in DokuWiki until now because I find that typing table markup by hand is error-prone and frustrating. But I had to for this job, so I went to review the DokuWiki syntax for tables, and what I saw seemed… familiar to me. It looked exactly like the output from my tsvfmt command line utility!

(Incidentally, you can also download tsvfmt as part of a bundle of command line utilities I’ve made in my dlm-dot-bin repository on GitHub.)

As it turns out, the output of tsvfmt is Dokuwiki-syntax tables. Who knew? The only caveat is that if you a header row, you have to convert the “|” character into a “^” character. I’ll leave modifying the script to do that as an exercise to my one reader.

Here’s How It Works

1. Save your spreadsheet in Tab-delimited (TSV) format. We’ll assume for the purposes of this document that you saved it in /Users/phil/Desktop/spreadsheet.tsv.
2. Download Donald’s tsvfmt Command-Line Utility. I’ll assume you’ve put it in /Users/phil/Desktop/tsvfmt.
3. Open up your favorite Terminal Application.
4. Generally, you type tsvfmt < spreadsheet.tsv. That command will output the Dokuwiki-formatted version of your table.
   • For the purposes of this file, you might want to first type cd /Users/phil/Desktop/ and then type sh tsvfmt spreadsheet.tsv|pbcopy. That will run the conversion and copy the results to the system clipboard.
5. The ONE CAVEAT of this conversion is that if your spreadsheet has a header row, you’ll want to convert the | characters to ^ characters in the first row. See DokuWiki Syntax for details on why.
6. Paste your results into your DokuWiki and bask in glory.

Source

For those too lazy to click links, here’s the source: