Generate a matrix from an excel worksheet [ExcelBundle-Symfony] - php

Question

I made the follow function for get a matrix from a worksheet.
private function getMatrixFromSheet($worksheet){
foreach ($worksheet->getRowIterator() as $row) {
$cellIterator = $row->getCellIterator();
$cellIterator->setIterateOnlyExistingCells(false);
foreach ($cellIterator as $cell) {
if (!is_null($cell)) {
$matrix[$cell->getRow()][$cell->getColumn()] = $cell->getCalculatedValue();
}
}
}
return $matrix;
}
In this way if I want to access to the second row, second col cell, I can do $matrix[2]['B'].
I need to be able to access to the matrix indexes both as number in order to access to the previous cell as $matrix[2][2].
Is there a way to do this?
I try to convert $cell->getColumn() result in a integer, but unfortunately (int) "a" == 0

Answer 1

If you just want a numeric value for the column, then PHPExcel provides a static helper method to do precisely that
$columnIndex = PHPExcel_Cell::columnIndexFromString($cell->getColumn());
Which returns 1 for column A, 2 for column B, 27 for column AA, 28 for column AB, etc
However, you might find that you can simplify your function completely, because PHPExcel also provides the toArray() method to do exactly what you've written this method for:
private function getMatrixFromSheet($worksheet){
return $worksheet->toArray();
}
Note that row/column offsets for the matrix returned by toArray() are 0-based