How to install SpreadSheet::ParseExcel using perl v5.6.1

I am trying to install SpreadSheet::ParseExcel on Solaris but it fails with this error,

Perl v5.8.0 required—this is only v5.6.1, stopped at

Is this module not compatible with perl v5.6.1? I tried using many other modules( SpreadSheet::Read, SpreadSheet::XLSX) to read excel in perl v5.6.1. 开发者_StackOverflow社区All of them internally use SpreadSheet::ParseExcel and eventually fail.

Is there anyway to get through this issue? Please help.

If you read the Changes file for Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, you'll see

0.53 August 24 2009

    + Made perl 5.8.0 a requirement for proper Unicode handling.

So, if you get Spreadsheet-ParseExcel-0.52.tar.gz from BackPan, you should be able to install it on 5.6.1. Of course, you won't get any bug fixes or new features from newer wersions. You may also need to fetch some of its prerequisites from BackPan, if their current releases won't install on 5.6.1.

But you should really consider building a newer version of Perl for that system. perlbrew can make that easier to do.

If you're on Solaris 9, looks like you'll have to build a newer version of Perl from source.

If you're on Solaris 10, Google suggests that you should have Perl 5.8.x also available on the system, and you may need to change settings to favour 5.8 over 5.6.

Other than that, I think you're out of luck -- 5.6.1 is ten years old, and very few modules will have legacy support that far back. There are versions of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel on CPAN from 2002, which don't require Perl 5.8, but you won't be able to guarantee support for anything changed in the XLS file format after Office XP, and you won't be able to work with XLSX files.