Question

I’m trying to export an array of arrays to excel. I have it set up to be a header variable, and a data variable that basically builds a giant string to be executed in the export. However, only the header variable is going through. Let me show some code:

This is setting the parameters:

    str_replace(" ", "_", $getData['name']);
    $filename = $getData['name']."_summary.xls";
    header("Content-Type: application/x-msdownload");
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
    header("Pragma: no-cache");
    header("Expires: 0");

Which goes to a function to get the information:

foreach($tempRS as $key=>$value)
{
    foreach($value as $iKey=>$iValue)
    {
        if($count == 6)
        {
            $iValue = str_replace('"', '""', $iValue);
            $iValue = '"'.$iValue.'"'."\n";
            $data .= trim($iValue);
            $count = 0;
        }
        else
        {
            $iValue = str_replace('"', '""', $iValue);
            $iValue = '"'.$iValue.'"'."\t";
            $data .= trim($iValue);
            $count++;
        }
    }

}
$header = "ROW HEADER 1\tROW HEADER 2\tROW HEADER 3\tROW HEADER 4\tROW HEADER 5\tROW HEADER 6\n";
print "$header\n$data";

I can’t seem to figure out why i’m losing the $data variable on the export.

Answer 1

Why not just fputcsv() to generate that CSV data for you? Or better yet, instead of making a .csv masquerade as an Excel file, you can use PHPExcel to output a native .xls/.xlsx and actually use formatting and formulae in the generated spreadsheet.