There is a possibility to operate excel documents skipping the WIN COM functions - through ODBC.
I've created an ODBC link to some excel file. That file had a pretty strong structure, but the common principles were clear to manipulate it.
Well, now through ODBC_connect I've connected to my db_excel_file. To had some data extracted from that file I had had to use something like that
odbc_exec(db_pointer,SQL_query);
where SQL_query was something like that: "select * from [sheet1$]".
Please DO NOTE the method of table_naming:
sheet1 - is the name of sheet, existing in excel workbook, then it must be followed by the $ sign, and the whole name must be included between [ and ].
That is the only way you can force excel data to be retrieved by the odbc sql querys.
Besides the fields have to be named like the Dbase's DBF fields, i.e. the first row in excel workbook have to contain field names, otherwise you will get some strange field names 🙂
Well, let's stop that crap. The purpose of all written above was
Why do anyway after quering excel data with "select * from [tablename$]" I get some mad data. Mad means not exactly as it is in the raw excel file?
The other way to extract the data I need is to use COM functions, but as follows from my native language stuff (cyrillic) I have all rus words be crippled 🙁. At first I've thought it was because of some coding troubles like (convert_cyr_string()) but that's not it, PHP just destroys the data.
As for english values in the cells - it is all OK.
I am appreciate if someone would read all this crap.
Zboris.
