I was struggling with how to convert a long two-column (A and B) Excel data set into a PHP associative array format and then found out how easy is this with the CHAR() built-in function. This is what I did.
1. For the data in the A1 and B1 cells, I simply entered the following formula into the C1 cell and bingo!
=CHAR(34)&A1&CHAR(34)&CHAR(61)&CHAR(62)&CHAR(34)&B1&CHAR(34)&CHAR(44)
where the unicode numbers 34, 61, 62, and 44 are used to render the double quote, equality, greater than, and comma symbols.
2. Then I just pasted the formula in the remaining cells of column C.
3. Finally, I pasted the result into a php text file, between the parentheses of
$arr=array( );
and removed the last comma from the last array element.
I know there is an easier way by writing a short macro, but this worked for me just fine.
I hope this saves some time to others.
