Download php results to an excel file????

landy_65613

I'm trying to download some query results to an excel file using the following code. Can anyone tell me why I'm getting an error?

<?
header( "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel" );
header( "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=contacts.xls" );
header( "Content-Description: Excel output" );

include("includes/dbconn.php");

?>
<?
$sql = "SELECT * FROM contacts";
$result = @($sql, $dbconn);
if (!$result) {
echo( "Unable to execute query at this time." );
exit();
}
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$name = $row['name'];
$email = $row['email'];
$phone = $row['phone'];
$dt = $row['dt'];
$company = $row['company'];

echo ("<tr>");
echo ("<td width=\"20%\" align=\"left\" bgcolor=#919AB5>$dt</td>");
echo ("<td width=\"20%\" align=\"left\" bgcolor=#919AB5>$name</td>");
echo ("<td width=\"20%\" align=\"left\" bgcolor=#919AB5>$email</td>");
echo ("<td width=\"20%\" align=\"left\" bgcolor=#919AB5>$phone</td>");
echo ("<td width=\"20%\" align=\"left\" bgcolor=#919AB5>$company</td>");
echo ("</tr>");
}
?>

😕

merkinmuffley

what's the error?

landy_65613

Actually, I'm not getting an error anymore, but I'm getting one long string of info in the excel file and it's all unintelligable. Also, somehow I think I'm getting cached because it doesn't ask me to download it anymore it just goes right to excel in the browser and shows the same info even though it's changed.
I do have the following header but it doesn't seem to make a difference:

header("Cache-control: must-revalidate\n");

Thanks for the response

merkinmuffley

hmm... i'm not sure if you can open an html document with a .xls filename and have excel read it correctly. it's not something that i've ever tried or seen done. what i do know is that you can send the file with a .csv extension and just put the data in comma-delimited format with a \n character after each row.

landy_65613

Like this?
echo ("$dt\"\n"");
echo ("$name\"\n"");
echo ("$email\"\n"");
echo ("$phone\"\n"");
echo ("$company\"\n"");

merkinmuffley

not quite, but close. looks like you're trying to get all the data from a single record of your result set, into a single row in excel. to do that you'd do something like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { 
$name = $row['name']; 
$email = $row['email']; 
$phone = $row['phone']; 
$dt = $row['dt']; 
$company = $row['company']; 


echo "\"$dt\",\"$name\",\"$email\",\"$phone\",\"$company\"\n";
}

landy_65613

actually, I'm trying to create headers for each row in excel like
Phone name email
$phone $name $email

merkinmuffley

ok, so just echo the header row before you start looping over the result set.

landy_65613

THanks so much for your help.......it works...........:-)