It's easy to save an Excel file as CSV and read it in PHP with the fgetcsv [1] function but this may not work so well if the file contains non-English characters.
Excel uses a non-standard character encoding for csv files.
You can save an Excel file as 'unicode' text however there are several unicode systems - Windows uses UTF-16, and PHP uses UTF-8.
To open the 'unicode text' file in PHP you have to convert it, in addition you may want to be able to open UTF-8 files that may be created by other systems.
PHP has an encoding detection function - but it can't detect UTF-16.
I've solved the problem with the following function which detects from several encodings, adds an appropriate filter, and returns a filehandle which reads as UTF-8.
<?php
function fopen_utf8($filename){
$encoding='';
$handle = fopen($filename, 'r');
$bom = fread($handle, 2);
// fclose($handle);
rewind($handle);
if($bom === chr(0xff).chr(0xfe) || $bom === chr(0xfe).chr(0xff)){
// UTF16 Byte Order Mark present
$encoding = 'UTF-16';
} else {
$file_sample = fread($handle, 1000) + 'e'; //read first 1000 bytes
// + e is a workaround for mb_string bug
rewind($handle);
$encoding = mb_detect_encoding($file_sample , 'UTF-8, UTF-7, ASCII, EUC-JP,SJIS, eucJP-win, SJIS-win, JIS, ISO-2022-JP');
}
if ($encoding){
stream_filter_append($handle, 'convert.iconv.'.$encoding.'/UTF-8');
}
return ($handle);
}
?>Links:
[1] http://www.php.net/fgetcsv