[php] How to create and download a csv file from php script?

I am a novice programmer and I searched a lot about my question but couldn't find a helpful solution or tutorial about this.

My goal is I have a PHP array and the array elements are showing in a list on the page.

I want to add an option, so that if a user wants, he/she can create a CSV file with array elements and download it.

I don't know how to do this. I have searched a lot too. But yet to find any helpful resource.

Please provide me some tutorial or solution or advice to implement it by myself. As I'm a novice please provide easy to implement solutions.

My array looks like:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [fs_id] => 4c524d8abfc6ef3b201f489c
            [name] => restaurant
            [lat] => 40.702692
            [lng] => -74.012869
            [address] => new york
            [postalCode] => 
            [city] => NEW YORK
            [state] => ny
            [business_type] => BBQ Joint
            [url] => 
        )

)

Use the following,

echo "<script type='text/javascript'> window.location.href = '$file_name'; </script>";

I don't have enough reputation to reply to @complex857 solution. It works great, but I had to add ; at the end of the Content-Disposition header. Without it the browser adds two dashes at the end of the filename (e.g. instead of "export.csv" the file gets saved as "export.csv--"). Probably it tries to sanitize \r\n at the end of the header line.

Correct line should look like this:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment;filename="'.$filename.'";');

In case when CSV has UTF-8 chars in it, you have to change the encoding to UTF-8 by changing the Content-Type line:

header('Content-Type: application/csv; charset=UTF-8');

Also, I find it more elegant to use rewind() instead of fseek():

rewind($f);

Thanks for your solution!

If you're array structure will always be multi-dimensional in that exact fashion, then we can iterate through the elements like such:

$fh = fopen('somefile.csv', 'w') or die('Cannot open the file');

for( $i=0; $i<count($arr); $i++ ){
    $str = implode( ',', $arr[$i] );
    fwrite( $fh, $str );
    fwrite( $fh, "\n" );
}
fclose($fh);

That's one way to do it ... you could do it manually but this way is quicker and easier to understand and read.

Then you would manage your headers something what complex857 is doing to spit out the file. You could then delete the file using unlink() if you no longer needed it, or you could leave it on the server if you wished.

That is the function that I used for my project, and it works as expected.

function array_csv_download( $array, $filename = "export.csv", $delimiter=";" )
{
    header( 'Content-Type: application/csv' );
    header( 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $filename . '";' );

    // clean output buffer
    ob_end_clean();

    $handle = fopen( 'php://output', 'w' );

    // use keys as column titles
    fputcsv( $handle, array_keys( $array['0'] ) );

    foreach ( $array as $value ) {
        fputcsv( $handle, $value , $delimiter );
    }

    fclose( $handle );

    // flush buffer
    ob_flush();

    // use exit to get rid of unexpected output afterward
    exit();
}

Try... csv download.

<?php 
mysql_connect('hostname', 'username', 'password');
mysql_select_db('dbname');
$qry = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tablename");
$data = "";
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($qry)) {
  $data .= $row['field1'].",".$row['field2'].",".$row['field3'].",".$row['field4']."\n";
}

header('Content-Type: application/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="filename.csv"');
echo $data; exit();
?>

Use the below code to convert a php array to CSV

<?php
   $ROW=db_export_data();//Will return a php array
   header("Content-type: application/csv");
   header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=test.csv");
   $fp = fopen('php://output', 'w');

   foreach ($ROW as $row) {
        fputcsv($fp, $row);
   }
   fclose($fp);