Gnumeric as just a parser?

[Wartan Hachaturow <wart softhome net>]

Hi.

I would really like to use Gnumeric's wonderful Excel file importing
in my web project (importing of user submitted data to SQL database).
All existing little tools that I tried (xls2csv, DBI::Excel) fail on
my Excel files, while Gnumeric does not :)
So, my question is -- is there some way to use Gnumeric as an external
filter, so that I could make the importing Excel->saving as CSV/gnumeric
XML/whatever parseable ;) without starting a GUI?
Performance is not the key point, since Excel file imports are done
not more than once a day..

-- 
Thanks in advance, Wartan.