How do I write my excel spreadsheet into a variable, using PhpExcel?

Question

After loading a PHPExcel object with my data, I want to output the contents directly into a php variable, instead of writing to a file. Have I missed the method to do that, for it seems that the only way to save is to save to disk.

Answer 1

You can use a writer to save to disk, or save to php://output. If the latter, you could use output buffering to capture that output and then store in a variable.... not sure quite why you'd want to do this though.

$objWriter = PHPExcel_IOFactory::createWriter($objPHPExcel, 'Excel2007'); ob_start(); $objWriter->save('php://output'); $excelOutput = ob_get_clean();