Merge pull request thoroc#5 from cmanley/master

Improvements. See changelog.

CHANGELOG

@@ -1,3 +1,21 @@
+2015-12-06 (Craig Manley)
+-	Forked by me (Craig Manley) from https://github.com/thoroc/php_writeexcel which is almost an exact copy of 0.3.0 with
+	a few warning suppressions, allowance of cell strings longer than 255 chars, and a composer.json file.
+-	Move examples into subdir.
+-	Replace space indentation with tabs.
+-	Add scopes to class properties.
+-	User code only needs to require the workbook class now. The worksheet is automatically included.
+-	Workbook constructor now uses an associative array of options, including now optional filename.
+-	Workbook: add getFileName() method to access the given or temporary filename.
+-	Workbook: add toString() method to return the workbook binary data as a string.
+-	Modified to act as a drop-in compatible replacement for PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, as far as I need:
+	*	format: make setting fonts with set_properties() compatible with PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer.
+	*	workbook: add alias method setCustomColor().
+	*	workbook: add send() method.
+	*	spreadsheet: add alias methods setMerge(), setColumn(), writeFormula(), writeNumber(), writeString(), writeUrl().
+-	Worksheet: add getDimensions() method.
+-	Worksheet: Fix some warnings. Fix bug (mistake porting from Perl) setting $grbit in _store_colinfo().
+
 0.3.0 (2005-11-01):
 - Fixed cell merging (fix contributed by Nicolas Kahn - thanks!)
 - Corrected the README: formulas are supported since version 0.2.2
@@ -7,16 +25,16 @@
 - Changed all calls of call_user_method_array() to call_user_func_array()
   as recent PHP versions complain about call_user_method_array() being
   deprecated (reported by Julien Detante and Luc Cessieux)
-- Added $_debug to the class variable declaration of 
-  class.writeexcel_biffwriter.inc.php and 
+- Added $_debug to the class variable declaration of
+  class.writeexcel_biffwriter.inc.php and
   class.writeexcel_worksheet.inc.php so that PHP doesn't complain about it
-- The demos now produce proper headers ("Content-Type" and 
+- The demos now produce proper headers ("Content-Type" and
   "Content-Disposition") so that the correct application gets loaded
   when an XLS file is received more reliably (thanks to
   C. Mourad Jaber)
 - Temporary files are now deleted (reported by Siggi Oskarsson)
 - Added example-colors.php
-- Fixed frozen and thawed panes (reported by Roger Jochem and Flavio 
+- Fixed frozen and thawed panes (reported by Roger Jochem and Flavio
   Ciotola)
 - Added example-panes.php to prove that it's really fixed ;-)
 - Added example-repeat.php because somebody reported that it doesn't

README

@@ -10,12 +10,12 @@ Where to start
 --------------
 I've included six example PHP scripts which are also taken out of the
 Spreadsheet::WriteExcel package and ported to PHP:
-- example-simple.php
-- example-merge2.php
-- example-stocks.php
-- example-textwrap.php
-- example-demo.php
-- example-bigfile.php
+- examples/simple.php
+- examples/merge2.php
+- examples/stocks.php
+- examples/textwrap.php
+- examples/demo.php
+- examples/bigfile.php
 All you have to do is to tar xzvf the package to a directory accessible
 via a web server. Then fetch any of the example scripts with your
 favourite web browser and Excel should come into place and show you

README.md

@@ -1,8 +1,9 @@
 php_writeexcel
 ==============
 
-Johann Hanne's php lib to write excel file
-
+PHP port of John McNamara's Spreadsheet::WriteExcel by Johann Hanne,
+with some tweaks by Thomas Roche (https://github.com/thoroc/php_writeexcel),
+and forked by Craig Manley adding more tweaks and some added drop-in compatibility with PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer.
 
 Dependencies
 ============
@@ -31,3 +32,15 @@ Example for your `composer.json` file:
 }
 ```
 
+Perfomance comparison
+=====================
+Update by Craig Manley, 2015-12-06:
+Writing a table of 8 fields and 950 rows to an Excel file resulted in these average elapsed times:
+```
+PHPExcel: 7.417
+PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer: 1.078
+php_writeexcel: 2.065
+```
+So clearly, PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer is almost twice as fast.
+PHPExcel is more modern, but by far the slowest and consumes huge amounts of memory,
+which is the only reason I tried with this library, updating it slightly in the process.