How to make asserts on the content from an Excel file?

Question

I have a action that returns an Excel file. Accessing that route in a browser will automatically download my Excel file.

I wrote a test for that action, but all that I can assert is the data from headers. Also, the test outputs the response directly to the console with text like w֑m�J�9���9�e�줽o��.

Is there a way to make asserts on data that comes from that Excel file output? The file is not saved, only the content is displayed in response. I'm using Symfony2.

EDIT

I found a way to read that data by saving the response in output buffer, saving the content in a .xlsx file, converting into a .csv file and get contents from there.

    ob_start();
    $this->client->request(
        'GET',
        '/myUrl',
        array(),
        array(),
        array()
    );

    $content = ob_get_clean();

    file_put_contents('MyFile.xlsx', $content);
    $reader = \PHPExcel_IOFactory::createReader('Excel2007');

    $excel = $reader->load('MyFile.xlsx');

    $writer = \PHPExcel_IOFactory::createWriter($excel, 'CSV');
    $writer->save('MyFileCsv.csv');

    $newContent = fgetcsv(fopen("MyFileCsv.csv", "r"));

Here is just a sketch. I stopped here, didn't try to read all content and make asserts, but I'm sure it can be done this way. Ah, don't forget to delete the files after.

Answer 1

You may use PHPexcel (can be found here: phpexcel) to parse your excel and assert on data collected by phpexcel