Exporting data from php to excel

Question

I need to export data from php (data retrieved from mysql database) to excel. I\'m using Zend Framework. I need to do some changes to my data before exporting to excel. Actu

Answer 1

With a bit of google you would have found this: http://www.the-art-of-web.com/php/dataexport/

Preparing the data

$data = array(
    array( "firstname" => "Mary", "lastname" => "Johnson", "age" => 25 ),
    array( "firstname" => "Amanda", "lastname" => "Miller", "age" => 18 ),
    array( "firstname" => "James", "lastname" => "Brown", "age" => 31 ),
    array( "firstname" => "Patricia", "lastname" => "Williams", "age" => 7 ),
    array( "firstname" => "Michael", "lastname" => "Davis", "age" => 43 ),
    array( "firstname" => "Sarah", "lastname" => "Miller", "age" => 24 ),
    array( "firstname" => "Patrick", "lastname" => "Miller", "age" => 27 )
);

The first step is to output the data in a tab-delimited format (CSV can also be used but is slightly more complicated). To achieve this we use the following code:

We set the content type to text/plain so that the output can more easily be viewed in the browser. Otherwise, because there is no HTML formatting, the output would appear as a single line of text.

The first line of output will be the column headings (in this case the field names are used). Values are separated with a tab \t and rows with a line break \n. The output should look something like the following:

firstname  lastname  age
Mary Johnson 25 
Amanda Miller 18 
James Brown 31 
Patricia    Williams     7 
Michael Davis 43 
Sarah Miller 24 
Patrick Miller 27

There's already a weakness in this code that may not be immediately obvious. What if one of the fields to be ouput already contains one or more tab characters, or worse, a newline? That's going to throw the whole process out as we rely on those characters to indicate column- and line-breaks.

The solution is to 'escape' the tab characters. In this case we're going to replace tabs with a literal \t and line breaks with a literal \n so they don't affect the formatting:

Now, before each row is echoed any tab characters are replaced "\t" so that our columns aren't broken up. Also any line breaks within the data are replaced with "\n".