Export to CSV via PHP

I personally use this function to create CSV content from any array.

function array2csv(array &$array){   if (count($array) == 0) {     return null;   }   ob_start();   $df = fopen("php://output", 'w');   fputcsv($df, array_keys(reset($array)));   foreach ($array as $row) {      fputcsv($df, $row);   }   fclose($df);   return ob_get_clean();}

Then you can make your user download that file using something like:

function download_send_headers($filename) {    // disable caching    $now = gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s");    header("Expires: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 06:00:00 GMT");    header("Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate");    header("Last-Modified: {$now} GMT");    // force download      header("Content-Type: application/force-download");    header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");    header("Content-Type: application/download");    // disposition / encoding on response body    header("Content-Disposition: attachment;filename={$filename}");    header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");}

Usage example:

download_send_headers("data_export_" . date("Y-m-d") . ".csv");echo array2csv($array);die();

You can export the date using this command.

<?php$list = array (    array('aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc', 'dddd'),    array('123', '456', '789'),    array('"aaa"', '"bbb"'));$fp = fopen('file.csv', 'w');foreach ($list as $fields) {    fputcsv($fp, $fields);}fclose($fp);?>

First you must load the data from the mysql server in to a array

Just for the record, concatenation is waaaaaay faster (I mean it) than fputcsv or even implode; And the file size is smaller:

// The data from Eternal Oblivion is an object, always$values = (array) fetchDataFromEternalOblivion($userId, $limit = 1000);// ----- fputcsv (slow)// The code of @Alain Tiemblo is the best implementationob_start();$csv = fopen("php://output", 'w');fputcsv($csv, array_keys(reset($values)));foreach ($values as $row) {    fputcsv($csv, $row);}fclose($csv);return ob_get_clean();// ----- implode (slow, but file size is smaller)$csv = implode(",", array_keys(reset($values))) . PHP_EOL;foreach ($values as $row) {    $csv .= '"' . implode('","', $row) . '"' . PHP_EOL;}return $csv;// ----- concatenation (fast, file size is smaller)// We can use one implode for the headers =D$csv = implode(",", array_keys(reset($values))) . PHP_EOL;$i = 1;// This is less flexible, but we have more control over the formattingforeach ($values as $row) {    $csv .= '"' . $row['id'] . '",';    $csv .= '"' . $row['name'] . '",';    $csv .= '"' . date('d-m-Y', strtotime($row['date'])) . '",';    $csv .= '"' . ($row['pet_name'] ?: '-' ) . '",';    $csv .= PHP_EOL;}return $csv;

This is the conclusion of the optimization of several reports, from ten to thousands rows. The three examples worked fine under 1000 rows, but fails when the data was bigger.