Here is a link to an already built Excel Parser...
http://www.zakkis.ca/produ
Lito.
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Browse All TopicsEvery day I need to update a website with the contents of an Excel file.
Is it possible to write a script that automatically checks a POP3 mailbox (setup especially for this purpose), reads the Excel attachment, and then automatically updates the website page with the content of the file?
The site is PHP using mySQL but I'm not limited by that technology. There is no cron facility provided by the hosting service.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Dave
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Here is a link to an already built Excel Parser...
http://www.zakkis.ca/produ
Lito.
Here is another parser but it is a perl module...
http://search.cpan.org/~kw
Lito.
Here is another PHP parser...
http://www.zakkis.ca/produ
Lito.
It's possible to use IMAP to check for emails in PHP.
http://www.php.net/imap
There is tons of information on that in the manual.
I've never done it, so I can't tell you how to do it exactly. But I know it can be done this way.
your webmail probably uses these functions as well. ;)
Hi there,
you mentioned that you dont have cron capability, so in order to execute you will have to some sort of an admin page and execute the script manualy. I don't know how to access POP3 but I'm sure it is possible, there are email clients built in PHP that do that sort of thing, most popular is SquirrelMail. Then in some sort of way your script will have to look for the right email that contains the attachment and process it. Problem is if you use a naming convention there is still a chance that a user error could happen when naming a file. My opinion is that it's not worth the time building it with POP3 in mind, but rather use a file upload. It will take less time to build and it will me reliable.
my 2 cents.
Lito
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by: Lito1Posted on 2004-01-14 at 09:29:42ID: 10112617
I don't know about checking your POP3 account, it sounds like more trouble then it's worth. But you can upload your excell file to the server and parse it to update your website. You will have to upload your file using <input type="file"> and after you will need to open it using fopen() function and do your processing using a regular expression or something of that sort.
It's hard to go into details when there are no details about format of the excell file and such.
Lito.