For those PHPers out there who are doing an export to Excel, I thought I'd share the solution I came up with. I realize there are already a gabillion examples out there, but I merged some of the better approaches from a few of them that made it fairly elegant, I think (such as leveraging the implode, array_keys, and array_values functions).
Without further adieux...
<?php $filename = "myExcelFile.xls"; //prepare to give the user a Save/Open dialog... //setting the cache expiration to 30 seconds ahead of current time. an IE 8 issue when opening the data directly in the browser without first saving it to a file //output the contents <?php
//your code here to create your sql statement...we'll call it $finalSQL
//go get the data we need...
$Result=mysql_db_query($DBName,$finalSQL,$Link);
//fetching each row as an array and placing it into a holder array ($aData)
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($Result)){
$aData[] = $row;
}
//feed the final array to our formatting function...
$contents = getExcelData($aData);
header ("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header ("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$filename);
$expiredate = time() + 30;
$expireheader = "Expires: ".gmdate("D, d M Y G:i:s",$expiredate)." GMT";
header ($expireheader);
echo $contents;
exit;
?>
function getExcelData($data){
$retval = "";
if (is_array($data) && !empty($data))
{
$row = 0;
foreach(array_values($data) as $_data){
if (is_array($_data) && !empty($_data))
{
if ($row == 0)
{
// write the column headers
$retval = implode("\t",array_keys($_data));
$retval .= "\n";
}
//create a line of values for this row...
$retval .= implode("\t",array_values($_data));
$retval .= "\n";
//increment the row so we don't create headers all over again
$row++;
}
}
}
return $retval;
}
?>