Re: [PHP] Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader problem

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 09:16:30AM -0700, Mattias Thorslund wrote:

> Paul M Foster wrote:
>> I process a lot of CSV files, and what I typically see is that Excel
>> will enclose fields which might contain commas in quotes. This gets
>> messy. So I finally wrote a C utility which parses the file and yields
>> tab-delimited records without the quotes.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>
> And fgetcsv() didn't work for you?
>
> http://www.php.net/fgetcsv

I wrote my utility (and the infrastructure to process these files) long
before I was working with PHP. For what I do with the files, I must pipe
one operation's results to another process/command to get the final
result. This is impossible with web-based PHP. So I shell out from PHP
to do it. Like this:

// convert original file to tab-delimited
cat maillist.csv | cqf | filter.cq3or4 > jones.tab
// filter unwanted fields and reorder fields
mlt3.py nady jones.tab jones.rdb
// build basic DBF file
dbfsak -r mailers.rdb jones.dbf
// append rdb records to DBF file
dbfsak -a jones.rdb jones.dbf

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster