I've just downloaded PHPExcel package and I tried to import an Excel spreadsheet, but all I get is an error ZipArchive not found. I work on Windows, but server is on Linux. I checked php.ini to see if php_zip is disabled, but it wasn't even there.
I tried installing it with PECL: $ pecl install zip
No releases availble for package "pecl.php.net/zip"
Cannot initialize 'channel://pecl.php.net/zip', invalid or missing package file
Package "channel://pecl.php.net/zip" is not valid
install failed
And also pear install zip-1.10.2.tgz but recieved pretty much the same message.
I don't have root permission to the server, maybe that's the case? Anyways, could you help me with this?
Answer
Certain spreadsheet file formats, such as OfficeOpenXML used as the default format by Excel 2007 and above, require ZipArchive. In most recent versions of PHP, ZipArchive is always available, but prior to PHP 5.3 it needed to be manually installed as a PHP extension.
As @briosheje says If you don't have ZipArchive installed/enabled for your PHP, then you can use
PHPExcel_Settings::setZipClass(PHPExcel_Settings::PCLZIP);
PCLZip is included in the PHPExcel distribution as an alternative to PHP's built-in ZipArchive class, though it is quite a bit slower. Enabling PCLZip allows you to work with zip-based spreadsheet formats even without ZipArchive.
However, when we first bundled PCLZip (originally in PHPExcel 1.7.6), it was only an option when writing zip-based formats, not when reading them. We changed that in PHPExcel 1.8.0, so enabling PCLZip now allows you to read zip-based formats as well as writing them.
The PHPEXcel Reader documentation details the different spreadsheet formats, and explains which ones are zip-based.