The accepted answer from Paul is great. I've made a small extension to this which is very useful if you have an multidimensional array like this (which is quite common):
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[a] => "a"
[b] => "b"
)
[1] => Array
(
[a] => "a2"
[b] => "b2"
)
[2] => Array
(
[a] => "a3"
[b] => "b3"
)
[3] => Array
(
[a] => "a4"
[b] => "b4"
)
[4] => Array
(
[a] => "a5"
[b] => "b5"
)
)
So I just took Paul's function from above:
/**
* Formats a line (passed as a fields array) as CSV and returns the CSV as a string.
* Adapted from http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php#87120
*/
function arrayToCsv( array &$fields, $delimiter = ';', $enclosure = '"', $encloseAll = false, $nullToMysqlNull = false ) {
$delimiter_esc = preg_quote($delimiter, '/');
$enclosure_esc = preg_quote($enclosure, '/');
$output = array();
foreach ( $fields as $field ) {
if ($field === null && $nullToMysqlNull) {
$output[] = 'NULL';
continue;
}
// Enclose fields containing $delimiter, $enclosure or whitespace
if ( $encloseAll || preg_match( "/(?:${delimiter_esc}|${enclosure_esc}|\s)/", $field ) ) {
$output[] = $enclosure . str_replace($enclosure, $enclosure . $enclosure, $field) . $enclosure;
}
else {
$output[] = $field;
}
}
return implode( $delimiter, $output );
}
And added this:
function a2c($array, $glue = "\n")
{
$ret = [];
foreach ($array as $item) {
$ret[] = arrayToCsv($item);
}
return implode($glue, $ret);
}
So you can just call:
$csv = a2c($array);
If you want a special line ending you can use the optional parameter "glue" for this.