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I am currently working on a web page that should do the following. As a little background, we are working on uploading a bunch of data that has a decent level of user-errors in the cell formatting to a database.

The data is stored in Excel spreadsheets. The spreadsheets are formatted in the same way, (99.9% of the time) but occasionally there are some wonky values within the cells themselves. Here is my goal: I would like the user to be able to

1) Provide the excel file to the page

2) Parse the file with PHP, then send the newly extracted data to a table on the page with editable cells

3) The user can see what came out of their file, then correct it for any slight errors before choosing to send the extracted data to the database.

I can do steps 2 and 3 using PHPExcel with a test file stored on the server, but I am having trouble getting from step 1 to step 2. My vision is to have the user specify the Excel spreadsheet and do the parsing without leaving the current page and losing the data in the fields. I would really like to keep the page from changing, as there are additional text fields on the page and I actually have to parse TWO spreadsheets before the data is taken from all of the fields and sent off to the database.

I guess I'm wondering if there's a way to use a client-provided file in PHP without doing a POST to upload. OR if there's a way to upload the file and have it parsed without leaving the page. I'm new to web development, so excuse me if those last few sentences made absolutely no sense.

Any thoughts?

Ben Atlas
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  • This question is far too broad for this site which is not a *"how to"* tutorial service. Every part of what you are asking is easily researched. You can ever parse the excel to an html table using javascript without doing an upload – charlietfl Jan 14 '17 at 02:30
  • Thank you for your last sentence. I did not know that you could do that. I've decided to use SheetJS to do exactly so. – Ben Atlas Jan 14 '17 at 23:08
  • There you go...have done exact same myself very effectively – charlietfl Jan 14 '17 at 23:09

1 Answers1

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PHP cannot do a single thing to the file until it is uploaded to the server. You could put a file upload form in an iframe and do some AJAX-y thing as described here.

As for handling PHP file uploads, the docs have a whole section.

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