kieranbarnes Independent PHP, WordPress & CubeCart Programmer

Converting XLS to CSV. Simple, eh? Well, sorta.

I hate problems that can be solved really easily. (With a totally different set of tools). I needed to open Excel (XLS) files in PHP. Simple enough you think, IF you are using Windows.

IF I was using Windows, I would have a bunch of options open to me, I could use PHP's COM & .NET functions. Or PHP's ODBC functions. Or a selection of classess from PHP Classes.

BUT I am using Linux. Just to be awkward. So I don't have any of those options.

AND to really confuse things, there are two packages called xls2csv.

• Ken Prows provides a Perl tool. View site.
• Vitus Wagner provides C tool part of the catdoc package. View site. (Currently down).

The best alternative to COM & ODBC I can find is Ken Prows' xls2csv package. I'd have to call this Perl utility via system() or similar from PHP. Already it sounds ugly.

Sometimes making a valid business decision being lazy pays off. I use Ubuntu. I can use apt to install catdoc

apt-get install catdoc

Job done. Usage is fairly straight forward. There is a man page here.

I slightly prefer Ken's version of this tool for a few reasons;

• His site works. Well, not his, CPAN's.
• It has a -q for quiet mode.

Here's how I installed it,

First off, You need a whole bunch of modules you've never heard of before.
It's probably worth throwing that lot into an interactive CPAN shell and letting it do the hard work.perl -MCPAN -e 'shell'

• Locale::Recode
• Unicode::Map
• Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
• Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtUnicode (Should come with the above).
• Text::CSV_XS

Now, download the source from Ken Prows' site.

CPAN wouldn't build xls2csv from the shell, but when I ran it manually, it seemed fine.

tar zxpfv xls2csv-1.06.tar.gz
cd xls2csv-1.06
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

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