[thelist] Excel parsing in PHP

Michael Pemberton evolt at mpember.net.au
Thu May 27 10:15:35 CDT 2004


sbeam wrote:
> Anyone have experience with parsing .xls files in PHP? Don't want COM 
> objects - and we just need the data, by worksheet->row->column and not 
> the formatting. It would need to parse and execute any formulas found 
> in a cell. We've found the following products and are leaning towards 
> the first but if there are better options or gotchas would love to 
> know:
> 
> http://www.softclub.org/excelexplorer/
> http://paggard.com/projects/xls.reader/
> http://www.webtoolup.com/products/index.php?s=1&p=32
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/xlreader/
> 
> thanks
> 

If Excel is anything like Word, then you've gotta be careful with any 
"scripted" option.

M$ likes to "quick save" the latest changes to a file *at the end* of 
the file.  This means that the actual data may not appear in the order 
you're expecting it to.

Is there any reason why you can't save the file as a .csv formatted file?
-- 
Michael Pemberton
evolt at mpember.net.au



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