using php to read excel content

raven1001

Is there any possibility that I can use php to read the data from excel by row and column.
For example, I have a data which has 30 rows and differentiate by 3 columns...

////////////////////////////////////////////////////
eg:

Name Score Gender
Michael 84 m
James 59 m
Jimmy 77 m

//////////////////////////////////////////////

and finally display in php "echo" thanks

justsomeone

I haven't come across an class or code library to parse excel files, and I trust you've searched for one and failed before coming here.

I'd imagine that such a script would be quite tricky in a *nix environment. As it would need to cope with multiple versions of Excel.

PHP on an IIS enviroment might be able to access an external dll to do the trick, I haven't seen that done, though.

Would it be possible for the Excel user to save the worksheet as a csv file instead of xls? If so, it would be a much, much easier task to solve.

Drakla

You can do it, but it's a right pain because the content of an XLS can be completely fractured. If you've just got a 'square' block of data it's not so bad. The reason I got into this php soup was because of the prospect of a job which was banging massive stats from an excel file to the web.

I've still got some code, but it's 2 years old, and rubbish, but it might help you get a connection to the file without having to set up a named ODBC resource in control panel

You then talk to the excel file with the php [MAN]odbc_fetch_row[/man] things and Jet SQL, the same as Access uses.

Something in this code might help you, but I've completely forgotten what it's all about, and really don't want to have to deal with it again - the CSV option would be much better.