CSV file and commas ???

Rulkster

I have a database that has a field where commas are used:

PID PNAME PTYPE
011 hello small,medium,large

In PTYPE above, commas are within the field.

I would like to export this table to a csv format but how do I tell it to NOT read the commas within a field as the deliminator?

leatherback

Read up on the csv format.

In short:
NUMBERS in CSv do not have an enclosing character, and are only separated by a e.g., a comma. Text is enclosed by a character, typically double quotes:

1, 2, 3, "This is text, really", "Text field 2, not three", 6

NogDog

The simple thing to do is use [man]fputcsv[/man], as it automatically deals with the CSV protocol for you. All you need to do is get the values you want to output for each line into an array, such as:

$fh = fopen('output.csv', 'w') or die("fopen failed");
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($queryResult))
{
   fputcsv($fh, $row);
}
fclose($fh);

Installer

And if you don't have PHP5 you could do something like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    $line = '';
    foreach ($row as $field) {
        $line .= '"' . $field . '",';
    }
    $str .= rtrim($line, ',') . "\n";
}
$fp = fopen($csv_file, 'w');
fwrite($fp, $str);
fclose($fp);

NogDog

Installer wrote:

And if you don't have PHP5 you could do something like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    $line = '';
    foreach ($row as $field) {
        $line .= '"' . $field . '",';
    }
    $str .= rtrim($line, ',') . "\n";
}
$fp = fopen($csv_file, 'w');
fwrite($fp, $str);
fclose($fp);

Darn, I forgot that fputcsv() is PHP5. You'd think I'd remember since I had to write my own function a few months ago for an application on a PHP4 server. :rolleyes:

NogDog

For PHP4 compatibility, I'd do something like this:

$str = '';
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    foreach ($row as $key => $field) {
        if(preg_match('/[,"\r\n]/', $field)) {
            $row[$key] = sprintf('"%s"', preg_replace('/"/', '""', $field));
        }
    }
    $str .= implode(',', $row) . "\n";
}
$fp = fopen($csv_file, 'w');
fwrite($fp, $str);
fclose($fp);