unable to read .xls without internal Summary section

[techieshark]

I'm trying to read spreadsheets that I grab from the web, and the files appear to be corrupted in a way that prevents the spreadsheet gem from reading them (however, I can read them in OpenOffice).

Given a test.xls file (with the internal Summary section near end of file), I expect to be able to still use spreadsheet gem to view the contents.

However, my test code produces no output.

After opening in OpenOffice and saving as test-fixed.xls, the test code produces the output I expect.

Note difference in files, shown by the 'file' command:

test.xls: CDF V2 Document, corrupt: Cannot read summary info
test-fixed.xls: CDF V2 Document, Little Endian, Os: Windows, Version 1.0, Code page: -535, Revision Number: 0

The test code and files are on this repo: https://github.com/techieshark/spreadsheet-bug

To reproduce,

git clone git://github.com/techieshark/spreadsheet-bug.git
cd spreadsheet-bug
./runtest.sh

Expected output is listed here: https://github.com/techieshark/spreadsheet-bug/blob/master/expected-output.txt

[zdavatz]

If you try to read random files, this is the expected behavior. It is difficult to comply with all the software out there, that creates XLS files.