Parsing Excel Documents

hermand

Right, I want users to be able to upload Excel documents. Thats not a problem, however, I want to be able to parse them and display them as HTML. How can I do this?

Any help would be mucho appreciated.

khaine

Best way if you are on linux is to cheat and use xlhtml

http://chicago.sourceforge.net/xlhtml/

it takes an xls file and automatically converts it into html for you all you need to do them is display the generated page.

Mark.

hermand

Nah, I need to do it with PHP. This is all my hosting, y'see, and they're c*nts. in fact, I may look into a more flexible host.

khaine

You might be scupered anyway then the php functions that access micro$oft products only work if the server runs on a windoze system. Most providers run *nix systems so the php functions are probably not available.

Mark.

hermand

Ach, I am not having a good day.

dinger

I was kind of wondering the same thing about parsing an MS-Word document into HTML on a linux box...Any ideas?

I imagine that if you can parse Excel, Word would be a similar function in the same package.

I can assume, however that, since MS-Office file formats are propietary, the chances of finding a solution are slim to none...

However, you might want to try asking your users to store the data as a CSV (Comma-Separated-Value) file. I do know this option is available in Excel and might do the trick...

Chris

khaine

The csv idea is a good one. You can also get them to store word documents as rich text files. These still allow all the normal text formatting but can be parsed by php. (I've not done this myself but I know others who have).

The best bet if you are on a *nix system and can install onto the server or have stuff intalled on the server is the xlhtml program for excel to html and either CZ-Doc2Htm or DOCtoHTML for converting word documents.

I know this doesn't really help hermand but dinger may be able to install on of them.

Mark.