Question

Is there a standard way or library to copy and paste from a spreasheet to a web form?
When I select more than one cell from Excel I (obviously) lose the delimiter and all is pasted into one cell of the web form.
Does it have to be done in VB? or could the processing be done once the paste action is started on the web form?

Answer 1

You don’t lose the delimiters, the cells are separated by tabs (\t) and rows by newlines (\n) which might not be visible in the form. Try it yourself: copy content from Excel to Notepad, and you’ll see your cells nicely lined up. It’s easy then to split the fields by tabs and replace them with something else, this way you can build even a table from them. Here’s a example using jQuery:

var data = $('input[name=excel_data]').val();
var rows = data.split("\n");

var table = $('<table />');

for(var y in rows) {
    var cells = rows[y].split("\t");
    var row = $('<tr />');
    for(var x in cells) {
        row.append('<td>'+cells[x]+'</td>');
    }
    table.append(row);
}

// Insert into DOM
$('#excel_table').html(table);

So in essence, this script creates an HTML table from pasted Excel data.