Export MySQL Data to CSV Using PHP

15 minutes into writing this article, I realized that PHP 5.1 now includes the fputcsv function that was missing from earlier versions of PHP. It formats a line (passed as a fields array) as CSV and write it (terminated by a newline) to the specified file handle. However, it is not properly documented what exactly is the "newline" character; is it CR, LF or CRLF.

I have a habit of re-inventing the wheel, so I've put together a substitute for this function that echoes the CSV data instead of writing to a file and (tries to) closely follow the recommendations described in RFC 4180.

Export Recordset Data to CSV Using ASP/VBScript

The CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file format is a text file format in which you can store tabular data, such as data from a database table. This format is can be read by various spread sheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc. This format is not suitable for storing binary data.

The following ASP/VBScript code sample allows you to export data from a database table to a CSV file. The code accesses the table through an ADODB Recordset object, formats the data into the CSV format and sends the data to the browser along with appropriate response headers. This code should be saved as an ASP script on a webserver. You should see an "Open/Save As..." dialog when you access the script through a web browser.