If you want to do this real-time, I can't help, but I'd like to see whatever
solution you do come up with. If you'd be happy to download your data and
mail the results, then perhaps I can help. I recently faced a similar
problem. I wrote a script that generates statistics for our proxy server,
and it worked great. However, my boss wanted me to mail the results to him
as a spreadsheet. He uses Notes as his E-mail client, Notes insisted on
opening the mail message in-line as text rather than launching Excel,
although I had no problems getting Outlook Express to launch Excel.
The solution I arrived at, with the help of some people on the HP Admin
mailing list, was to store the data as a CSV file and attach it to a mail
message. The Perl module needed for this is MIME-tools. MIME-tools uses
IO-stringy and MIME-Base64, but you've probably got MIME-Base64 already since
you're using lwp.
Here's a snippet of code that sends a .csv file as a mail attachment. I've
only used it on HP-UX. Clicking on the mail message attachment will launch
Excel from either a Notes or Outlook Express mail client. The person from
whom I got the original version of this says it works with Outlook mail
clients as well.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use MIME::Entity;
#Create some in-line text just for the hell of it.
push @my_message, "This is the data you requested.\n";
# Create an entity. It's that "multipart/mixed" MIME type that makes
# all the difference to Notes.
$top = build MIME::Entity Type => 'multipart/mixed',
From => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]',
To => '[EMAIL PROTECTED]',
Subject => "Mail Test";
# Attach the inline text to it:
$top->attach(Data => \@my_message,
Type => 'text/plain',
Disposition => 'inline',
Encoding => 'quoted-printable');
# Now, attach the CSV file as an attachment. In my production version,
# I have multiple CSV files, so the following is in a loop, and the "Path"
is:
# $top->attach(Path => $csv_file,
$top->attach(Path => './proxy-stats.csv',
Type => 'application/octet-stream',
Disposition => 'attachment',
Encoding => 'quoted-printable');
open MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t -odq"; #Pipe for the message.
# Output it:
$top->print(\*MAIL);
close MAIL;
# That's it. Works great.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael A. Chase" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Rajesh Kirpalani" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2000 10:39 PM
Subject: Re: How can I use libwww with MSExcel ??
> The easiest way would be to have a script download the quotes (using
libwww)
> and format them into a tab separated field file and load that file into
> Excel. After you have that working, you might try using Win32::OLE (part
of
> libwin32) or something similar from the Perl script to drive Excel.
> --
> Mac :})
