Question

Going around in circles so hopefully someone can put me right.

Generating a CSV through PHP and using my data from MySQL. Data is inputted by the user via TinyMCE so has various “p” tags etc that I obviously need to strip out which I can do successfully, however the string in the csv still gets displayed in various different cells even after being stripped.

I’ve tried using strip_tags() and preg matching “/n” and “/r” and all sorts to remove line breaks but no luck as it still appears on new cells.

I’m using a semi colon as the seperator in the csv.

An example of a string i’m trying to strip all html from would be<p>I would like to join because it looks fun</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Help me.</p>. It only happens when their is more than one

tag or something – if the string is simply one line, it works no issues.

Heres the csv code i’m using:

    echo 'Username;Email;Date joined;Reason for joining'."\r\n";

    foreach($users as $user) {
        $csv_data .= $user->username . ';' . $user->email. ';' . date("d/m/y", $user->time_created) . ';' .  $user->reason_for_joining  .';'."\r\n";
    }

    echo $csv_data;

Where am i going wrong?

Thanks guys 🙂

Answer 1

The CSV format has more pitfalls than one might imagine (as you are experiencing). Therefore, don’t reinvent the wheel and use fputcsv, which correctly escapes everything that needs escaping.

fputcsv expects to write to a file, but you can give it a fake file to write to instead, as outlined here:

$fp = fopen('php://output', 'w');

$delimiter = ';';
$headers = array('Username', 'Email', 'Date joined', 'Reason for joining');
fputcsv($fp, $headers, $delimiter);

foreach ($users as $user) {
    $fields = array($user->...);
    fputcsv($fp, $fields, $delimiter);
}

fclose($fp);