I have an Excel spreadsheet that has been uploaded to a MySQL database and stored as binary data in a BLOB field using UTF-8 encoding. I'm passing a scalar reference to the binary data to the Workbook->Parse() method but it always returns undef. I know the spreadsheet data is OK because I can use the same scalar reference, together with suitable HTTP headers to export the data to Excel via a web browser.

Do I need to read the binary data into a temporary file first with a suitable encoding option and then pass this file to the Parse() method? Or is there another problem here?

Any thoughts and/or advice welcomed.