Read Excel/CSV data in PHP

I had a requirement to read the data that has stored as Excel file.
when i googled it i found the following links

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/

http://paggard.com/projects/xls.reader/

http://forums.codewalkers.com/pear-packages-47/spreadsheet-excel-reader-852965.html

http://punbb.informer.com/forums/topic/9918/how-to-read-xls-file-using-php/

But in my case all those solutions got failed by some reasons

Then i tuned to another method
i just 'Save As..' the excel file into .csv format and used the below script to read it simply

 $fp = fopen('sample2.csv','r') or die("can't open file");
print "<table>\n";
while($csv_line = fgetcsv($fp,1024)) {
    print '<tr>';
    for ($i = 0, $j = count($csv_line); $i < $j; $i++) {
        print '<td>'.$csv_line[$i].'</td>';
    }
    print "</tr>\n";
}
print '</table>\n';
fclose($fp) or die("can't close file");

One issue i found in that is
if we left any columns empty in some rows it is avoiding those column while reading.