How to read cell data from an Excel document with objective-c

Question

I'm building an iPhone app that has to download an Excel (.xls) file from a website and perform a string search of the spreadsheet data. I've done this in C#, but I have no idea how to do this in objective-c. How do I access the individual cells using objective-c?

Answer 1

There is no innate ability to read Excel data into a Foundation container, like an NSArray or NSDictionary. You could, however, convert the file (with Excel) to a comma-separated-value (CSV) file and then parse each line's cells on the iPhone using the NSString instance method -componentsSeparatedByString:.