Question

I am trying to serve up a dynamically generated csv file. For some reason when I get the file, there are 18 empty rows preceding the data. I don’t have any space between the headers I define and the csv data I’m sending. If I write the data to a file on the server, it does not get these empty rows. However, if I write the file and then try to serve it to the user, the empty lines come back. So I’m wondering if perhaps I’ve messed up the headers, or if perhaps there is another issue I’m not thinking of:

function generate_csv($source_type, $include_unpublished = FALSE) {

   // retrieve data from DB
   ....

   // start up headers
   $csv_name = "$source_type-$data_set-csv_" . date('Y-m-d') . '.csv';
   header('Content-Type: text/x-comma-separated-values');
   header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
   header('Cache-Control: private', false); // required for certain browser
   header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $csv_name . '"'); 

   // send csv data
   print $csv_data;

} //end function

Disclaimer: I asked this question at https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/27649/extra-empty-rows-when-serving-csv-file, but it dosn’t seem to be drupal-specific and there weren’t many ideas coming up over there..

Answer 1

It must be problem with files that you are including. Every whitespace more than one newline after php closing tag ?> is sent to the browser.

Best solution is to get rid of this closing tags in every php file.

Other option will be to remove only unnecessary new lines from them or to bufer output and disregard it before serving file.