Question

I created a web application and I want to add a feature like user can export selected records…

Check Box   Name    Email

            Sumit   [e-mail]
            Karan   [e-mail]

I want to export this records into an excel file, but only the selected records should be exported.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

There’s no need to download external libraries – everything you need for this is already built into PHP.

Steps:

1. Do query in php to get the rows you want to output
   You can use SELECT * FROM table WHERE id IN (1,2,...)
2. Use mysql_fetch_array() or mysql_fetch_assoc() to get the rows one at a time
3. Use fputcsv() to output them to a file ending in csv – this will properly escape your data

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-fetch-array.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php

Excel will be able to read the file.

Override the defaults for fputcsv to use tabs for delimiters and Excel will have an even easier time reading the file. If you use commas (the default) you may need to pick commas as the delimiter on Excel import.

Here’s a working example assuming you already have rows set up:

$rows; // predefined
$filename = 'webdata_' . date('Ymd') . '.csv';

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream"); 
// that indicates it is binary so the OS won't mess with the filename
// should work for all attachments, not just excel

$out = fopen("php://output", 'w');  // write directly to php output, not to a file
foreach($rows as $row)
{
  fputcsv($out, $row);
}
fclose($out);