Question

I have a function that exports values into a CSV file, but the ‘comments’ field has commas in it and it messes up the columns when you open it in a spreadsheet program.

Is there a way around exporting it properly?

//this exports only names and comments into a CSV file function exportNamesCommentsCSV($table, $columns) {     $file = 'volunteer_comments';     $csv_output = '';     $table = 'volunteers_2009';     $result = mysql_query('select * FROM '.$table.'');     $i = 0;     if (mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {         while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {             $csv_output .= $row['Field'].', ';             $i++;         }     }     $csv_output .= '\n';      $values = mysql_query('SELECT lname, fname, email, comments FROM '.$table.'');      while ($rowr = mysql_fetch_row($values)) {         for ($j=0;$j<$i;$j++) {             $csv_output .= $rowr[$j].', ';         }         $csv_output .= '\n';     }      $filename = $file.'_'.date('Y-m-d_H-i',time());     header('Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel');     header('Content-disposition: csv' . date('Y-m-d') . '.csv');     header( 'Content-disposition: filename='.$filename.'.csv');     print $csv_output;     exit; } 

EDIT: This would be an example of a comment…

I would prefer to work the gates, but I can work anywhere really.

The , (comma) in the example comment above throws off the proper column structure.

Answer 1

What you need to do is enclose values in quotes, like so:

'value','value','value' 

This will correctly handle commas in the values, and numeric values will also still work fine.

To put a quote in the value, however, you need to put two quotes together. E.g. representing this string:

Bobby says, 'Hi!' 

it will need to be represented as

'some value','Bobby says, ''Hi!''','Some other value' 

You can do this with:

$csv_value = '\'' . eregi_replace('\'', '\'\'', $orig_value) . '\'';