Reading Excel files. Which programming language to choose?

Question

Programming

There is a task: to read xls and xlsx files (from under Excel 2003, 2007, 2010), and it can also be excel files generated by someone, which even Excel itself opens swearing at the wrong format.
Now a php reader is written using PHPExcel, but we found a number of files that it cannot eat. Well, plus this library is extremely slow and memory hungry.
Hence the question, we want to refactor the whole thing and we are thinking of writing in another programming language, and here we don’t know how to choose a language (to find a programmer) if we ourselves only know php.
And then sort through all the languages ​​​​and look for a programmer for each, write a solution, and then compare the speed and capabilities is somehow expensive.
We know that there are either under Python and under C #, maybe there are some other solutions?
UPDATE 04/22/2016
We found a programmer who wrote a script in pearl, the speed is amazing, and the omnivorousness is also amazing, what PHPExcel could not read this one reads twice.

Answer 1

It seems to me that it would be more correct not to choose a language, but a developer. On any freelance exchange, write your requirements for the program in terms of functionality and speed of work, attribute the processing of those files that the existing solution does not eat to the mandatory conditions and look at the result by checking both normal and inedible files.

Answer 2

100500 different versions of the file format is not a problem of the programming language and the library, it is only the problem of Excel itself, and no more. We need to make him solve his own problems - write a script that makes Excel open his crafts and export their contents to a human format. After that, you can already programmatically work with data in a convenient format with convenient tools without wasting memory. As a data format, you can take CSV, for example, although the choice of options is huge.

Answer 3

https://github.com/search?q=xlsx+&type=Repositorie...
Among compiled languages,
https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx leads in the number of stars/forks

Answer 4

I use PHPExcel no problems (reads all formats and not only excell). 1k records flies into the database with less than a second processing.
A lot of opportunities, and change the color, and merge cells, everything you need is there.

Answer 5

Denis Borisov , answered you correctly. Clearly define requirements and choose developers.
And the programming language will be determined from your requirements.