[Ruby] working with excel spreadsheets (.xls) in ruby/rails

[shaners becker]

i'm building an app that will updates its list of available products  
every month from a file on the distributors website. unfortunately,  
they don't provide anything remotely resembling an api. the best i  
can do is import the contents of an Excel spreadsheet.

i've looked around a bit and all i'm seeing is:
- generating xls files from ruby
- manually export a .csv from excel then importing from that
- using windows specific ruby libraries

before i dig into this and start building it myself, i wanted to know  
if anyone else knows of anything out there that doesn't anything like  
this. basically, just reads the contents of an .xls file and enters  
them into a table with an identical mapping.

any ideas?
thanks
shane

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