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....00071ba2b4434e

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,
Hemanth

[Geoff Muldoon]

he*****************@gmail.com says...

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?

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