exporting data to comma-delimited file

arhea

Hi everyone,

I am working on a project with a client who wants to be able to generate mailing labels from the results of a MySQL query on their customer database. I'm thinking the easiest way to do this would be to export the results of the query into a comma or tab delimited text file, and then import the file into Word or some other word processing program. Only trouble is, I have no idea how to go about doing this. I have searched the web and found no information. All I know at this point is that I will probably need to use fwrite() (right?) Other than that, I am clueless. Any help would be much appreciated. 🙂

Thanks in advance,
Amber

Mordecai

Open the file for writing:
$fp fopen($file,"w"); // $fp is the filepointer, "w" means "write only"

Now, write to the file:
fwrite($fp,$contents); // $contents will have to be a variable containing everything you want to write. You can set it like any other variable.

Now, close the file:
fclose($fp);

arhea

Originally posted by Mordecai
Now, write to the file:
fwrite($fp,$contents); // $contents will have to be a variable containing everything you want to write. You can set it like any other variable.

Thank you for the fast reply! This looks fairly straightforwad. My only remaining question is about the $contents variable. I understand that I will have to set this variable, but how? What I mean is, how do I specify the format in which I want the data to be saved/exported?

I'm assuming it will be a MySQL query, but.... how do I get from that to a nice address format like:

Foo Bar
123 Foo Rd.
Anytown, NY 12345

? Thanks again!

Mordecai

Lets assume that these have names, and are retrieved from a MySQL query.
$name = "Foo Bar";
$address = "123 Foo Rd.";
$city = "Anytown, NY 12345";
$contents = "$name,$address,$city";

arhea

Great, thank you! 🆒

I will also need to include some header information such as

header("Content-disposition: csv" . date("Y-m-d") . ".doc");

Yes?

Mordecai

The content disposition field will have to follow RFC 2183.
http://www.mhonarc.org/~ehood/MIME/rfc2183.txt

The mime type for a .doc is "application/msword."