Reading Excel files using PHP

[Hemanth]

Hello there,

Could someone pls give me pointers (or examples) on how to use PHP
(installed on a linux) to read & write MS Excel spreadsheets. So far
I've been converting a spreadsheet to text (as tab separated values)
and processing the text file. I'm wondering if I can avoid this step
and process the .xls file directly.

I found a thread in this group - related to this topic - but it says,
MS excel needs to be installed on target machine to use PHP's COM. I
assume he's talking about PHP running on windows target machine. How
can I use a similar approach on linux machine?

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.php/browse_frm/thread/1db1f1235e00344/8300071ba2b4434e?q=reading+excel&rnum=1#8300071ba2b4434e

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,
Hemanth

[Geoff Muldoon]

Re: Reading Excel files using PHP

hemanth.singams etty@gmail.com says...
[color=blue]
> Could someone pls give me pointers (or examples) on how to use PHP
> (installed on a linux) to read & write MS Excel spreadsheets. So far
> I've been converting a spreadsheet to text (as tab separated values)
> and processing the text file. I'm wondering if I can avoid this step
> and process the .xls file directly.
>
> I found a thread in this group - related to this topic - but it says,
> MS excel needs to be installed on target machine to use PHP's COM. I
> assume he's talking about PHP running on windows target machine. How
> can I use a similar approach on linux machine?[/color]

I found a couple of class files which allow you to read Excel format files
on any platform:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/

I had also considered another one:

http://paggard.com/projects/xls.reader/

Geoff M