Question

I have an array of strings and want a way to create a CSV line from them. Something like:

$CSV_line = implode(',',$pieces);

Will not work as the pieces may contain comma and double quotes.
Is there a PHP built in function that takes the pieces and return a well formatted CSV line?

Thanks,
Roge

Answer 1

As far as I know there is no such built in function. The one I’m aware of is fputcsv that does exactly what you want
but it does not return the CSV line, but writes it to a file.

<?php

$pieces = array (
    'a,b,c,d',  // contains comma.
    '"1","2"'   // contains double quotes.
);

$fp = fopen('file.csv', 'w');

fputcsv($fp, $pieces); // "a,b,c,d","""1"",""2""" written

fclose($fp);
?>

Most of the times you want create the line of CSV and write it to the file. So the above function should suffice.

I’d written one such function for PHP4 as it does not support fputcsv. I’ll share it with you:

// If a value contains a comma, a quote, a space, a tab, a newline, or a linefeed,
// then surround it with quotes and replace any quotes inside it with two quotes
function make_csv_line($values)
{
    // iterate through the array ele by ele.
    foreach($values as $key => $value) 
    {
        // check for presence of special char.
        if (    (strpos($value, ',')  !== false) || (strpos($value, '"')  !== false) ||
            (strpos($value, ' ')  !== false) || (strpos($value, "\t") !== false) ||
            (strpos($value, "\n") !== false) || (strpos($value, "\r") !== false)) 
        {
            // if present, surround the ele in quotes..also replace 
            // already existing " with ""
            $values[$key] = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $value) . '"';
        }
    }

    // now create the CSV line by joining with a comma, also put a \n at the end.
    return implode(',', $values) . "\n";
}