Using file.readlines.size to get the total number of lines of xlsx files in Ruby, but it returned the wrong number of rows

Question

In ruby, I tried to use file.readlines.size to get the total number of rows in xlsx files, but there are 1200 rows in my files, file.readlines.size return me 322 insdead of 1200. I want to know why it's wrong and what's is the correct way to get the number of rows in a xlsx file. Thank you

Answer 1

It returns the wrong size because file.readlines looks for line breaks to separate lines from one another. This only works with text files and xlsx is either binary or xml-based file. You need to parse the file using a specialized parser to find out how many spreadsheet rows are in it. One gem which does it is Roo.