parsing excel files

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
my issue got to do with parsing excel files frequently....
i am not using code igniter presently but this is a plain PHP issue....
there is a category and a sub-category....
if a user logs in to the site, if he clicks on category, some information stored in excel files will be displayed to the user......also the category has sub-category where he can see more information which is stored in other excel files....since this is time consuming to pull data from excel files which is stored in database each time the user views it is there a mechanism like where he can pull out the excel file and let the excel file remain in memory, so that he gets information faster? hope it is clear enough....

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
so here is what i found my reading that file_get_contents() does help in retreiving file contents and acting as primary memory but it writes the entire file to string which is not very useful....i used sessions here and checked if the session is unset before closing the file? is it close enough or do we have better ideas???

[eluser]LuckyFella73[/eluser]
The best way would be to save the data from your excel files directly
as DB data - but maybe you have reasons why you can't do this.

There is a Excel plugin available für Codeigniter:
http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Excel_Reader_Class/

I didn't use it but it sounds to be useful. Sorry for not directly
answering your question - I just thought you are maybe faster solving
your problem by building the application with Codeigniter or if possible
by storing you data as "normal" DB data.