Excel::Writer::XLSX Unreadable content error - excel

Question

I just started using Perl and I am using
Excel::Writer::XLSX
to query a DB2 database and export the data to an .xlsx file. The data is about 250k rows.
The script is running fine, but when I try to open the Excel file it throws an error and asks to repair the file. Upon repairing some of the data gets replaced by inf.
Below is a snippet from my code.
while ( my $sqlStatement = ) {
$mSQL = $dbh->prepare( $sqlStatement )
or die "Can't prepare $sqlStatement";
$mSQL->execute()
or die "Can't execute $sqlStatement";
}
my $workbook = Excel::Writer::XLSX->new( $ARGV[2] );
$workbook->set_tempdir( '/tempDir/' );
$workbook->set_optimization();
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();
$worksheet->keep_leading_zeros();
my $row = 0;
my $column = 0;
my #emptyRow = ();
$worksheet->write_row( $row++, $column, [ #{ $mSQL->{NAME_uc} } ] );
$worksheet->write_row( $row++, $column, [ #emptyRow ] );
while ( my #Row = $mSQL->fetchrow_array ) {
$worksheet->write_row( $row++, $column, [ #Row ] ); #, $cellFormat);
$count++;
}
$workbook->close();
Can someone please advise me on this issue?

Answer 1

Finally i figured it out (Thanks to John McNamara). This was resolved by adding a write handler that uses regular expressions to check if a particular token is being converted to "inf", and if it does, it invokes the write_string subroutine instead of write_row.
Below is the code.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Excel::Writer::XLSX;
my $workbook = Excel::Writer::XLSX->new( 'write_handler5.xlsx' );
my $worksheet = $workbook->add_worksheet();
# Add a handler to match any numbers in order to check for and handle
# infinity.
$worksheet->add_write_handler( qr[\d], \&write_with_infinity );
# The following function is used by write() to pre-process any the data when a
# match is found. If it finds something that looks like a number but evaluates
# to infinity it write it as a string.
sub write_with_infinity {
my $worksheet = shift;
my #args = #_;
my $token = $args[2];
# Check if token looks like a number, in the same way as write().
if ( $token =~ /^([+-]?)(?=[0-9]|\.[0-9])[0-9]*(\.[0-9]*)?([Ee]([+-]?[0-9]+))?$/ ) {
# Check for infinity.
$token = $token + 0;
if ($token =~ /inf/) {
# Write the value as a string instead of a number.
return $worksheet->write_string( #args );
}
}
# Reject the match and return control to write()
return undef;
}