file handling help - urgent

[maransekar]

Hello all

One of my client is uploading a excel file which will contain ID, Name, Hours, Rate in four separate columns. As far as i know its not possible to read an excel file using PHP, correct me if i'm wrong.

Is there a possibility to read an excel file using PHP? If not is there any other way like saving the excel file as a csv file?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this quiet urgent.

Many Thanks

[drawmack]

The easiest for you is for them to save it as a csv and then upload that. However you could parse the excel file I think http:pear.php.net has some classes to help parse an excel file.

[tsinka]

Hi,

save it as csv and use fgetcsv

Thomas

[maransekar]

thanks for your responses guys.

I tried to convert the excel file and saved it as a .csv file but its putting all sort of crap in it.

Does anybody have a script which save the excel file as a .csv file?

Once again thanks for the help

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by maransekar
Does anybody have a script which save the excel file as a .csv file?

Excel can save excel files as CSV files (under the "Save As" dialogue).

[maransekar]

Thanks for your help weekpacket, but i'm not asking how to save excel file as a .csv in windows. I'm asking how to save a excel file as a .csv file using PHP program on a Linux Server.

Let me explain it clearly:

My customer uploads a excel file with some data, which i have read through in my script and update the database accordingly. Because i don't think there is a way to read the excel file in PHP, i would like to save that excel file as a .csv file and then open it read the content.

I hope this should be clear. I really appreciate your help guys. Can someone tell me how to convert the excel file as a csv file in a script or somebody has a script?

Many Thanks 🙁

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by maransekar
Thanks for your help weekpacket, but i'm not asking how to save excel file as a .csv in windows. I'm asking how to save a excel file as a .csv file using PHP program on a Linux Server.

Let me explain it clearly:

My customer uploads a excel file with some data, which i have read through in my script and update the database accordingly. Because i don't think there is a way to read the excel file in PHP, i would like to save that excel file as a .csv file and then open it read the content.

I hope this should be clear. I really appreciate your help guys. Can someone tell me how to convert the excel file as a csv file in a script or somebody has a script?

Many Thanks 🙁

Well, you're actually talking in circles: if a PHP script can't read an excel file (or work with an excel file) it can't convert an excel file to CSV so that it can read it. Because it can't read it. Right?

drawmack has suggested looking at pear.php.net - I found one package there to write excel files. www.phpclasses.org also has some stuff (do a search for "excel"). So do these forums (which can be found by searching for "read excel").

[AstroTeg]

Perl has a nifty Excel library available to it. Nifty to the point I didn't have to work too hard to persuade Perl to read an Excel file of my choice.

Then I had PHP exec my perl script with the Excel file name as a parameter. I had the Perl script convert the Excel file to CSV and save the output using a standard naming convention so PHP could guess the name when Perl got done. Once PHP finished running the Perl script, there was a CSV file all ready to go.

As Weedpacket mentioned, there may already be a PHP library out there that can do this. A while ago I didn't find any but I did find Perl had one available so I used its instead.

[AstroTeg]

Found the Perl code. The library you want is this: Spreadsheet:😛arseExcel