Although PHP does not have any direct capability to read a specific spreadsheet format (that is, XLSX, ODS, and so on), it does have the ability to read (CSV Comma Separated Values) files. Accordingly, in order to process customer spreadsheets, you will need to either ask them to furnish their files in CSV format, or you will need to perform the conversion yourself.
When uploading a spreadsheet (that is, a CSV file) into a database, there are three major considerations:
Iterating through a (potentially) massive file
Extracting each spreadsheet row into a PHP array
Inserting the PHP array into the database
Massive file iteration will be handled using the preceding recipe. We will use the fgetcsv()
function to convert a CSV row into a PHP array. Finally, we will use the (PDO PHP Data Objects) class to make a database connection and perform the insert.