Question

Hi~ I am using PHPExcel 1.7.7 to read XLSX files and present the results in web pages.

I’m trying to get the value of a cell that stores a date & time string and process it in PHP using the following code.

<?php

date_default_timezone_set('Australia/Canberra'); 

$value = $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->getCell('A1')->getValue();

define('MIN_DATES_DIFF', 25569);
define('SEC_IN_DAY', 86400);

function excel2Timestamp($excelDate)
{
  if($excelDate <= MIN_DATES_DIFF)  
  {
     return 0;
  }

  return ($excelDate - MIN_DATES_DIFF) * SEC_IN_DAY;
}

echo $result = date('H:i:s d/m/Y', excel2Timestamp($value)); 

?>

while the original value in the cell is “00:00:00 01/07/2012”, instead of giving me the correct results, the output from the above PHP code shows “10:00:00 01/07/2012”.

It seems that it is caused by the time zone differences, but I have already defined the time zone at the beginning of the code. No idea what is wrong with it.

Can anyone please help me with it? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Forget your function to convert to timestamp (I was doing the same too)… PHPExcel does the convertion automatically, so try doing this:

//get the excel date value (if it's stored in the A1 cell)
$excelDate = $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->getCell('A1')->getValue();
//converts from excel format to a datetime object
$date = PHPExcel_Shared_Date::ExcelToPHPObject($excelDate);
//format the date as you want.
$formatedDate = $date->format('m/d/Y');

It should work.