Question

I have encountered weird behavior of PHPExcel lib (I have never used it before). I have code like this:

$inputFileName = 'excel.ods';
echo 'Loading file ',pathinfo($inputFileName,PATHINFO_BASENAME),' using IOFactory to identify the format<br />';
$objPHPExcel = PHPExcel_IOFactory::load($inputFileName);
$sheetData = $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->toArray(null,true,true,true);

I dont know what exactly toArray method does because I CAN’T FIND ANY DOCUMENTATION OF THIS THING. I think that the problem occurs when an excel file has some blank cells – they are not copied but next cell is wriiten in their places or something. Could someone provide me documentation to function toArray? (i think that something is wrong with that parameters).

Thank you in advance 🙂

PS: it is code from example

Answer 1

toArray() takes the data from each cell in the worksheet and puts it in a PHP array

/**
 * Create array from worksheet
 *
 * @param    mixed      $nullValue            Value returned in the array entry
 *                                            if a cell doesn't exist
 * @param    boolean    $calculateFormulas    Should formulas be calculated?
 * @param    boolean    $formatData           Should formatting be applied to cell
 *                                            values?
 * @param    boolean    $returnCellRef        False - Return a simple array of
 *                                            rows and columns indexed by number
 *                                            counting from zero
 *                                            True - Return rows and columns
 *                                            indexed by their actual row and
 *                                            column IDs
 * @return array
 */

The documentation for PHPExcel is in the folder /Documentation.
API docs are in /Documentation/API
Examples are in the folders /Tests and /Documentation/Examples

There is a bug in the current 1.7.7 release that can misalign cells read from ods files when there are blank cells in the worksheet. This bug has been fixed in the latest code on github.