Create a CSV File for a user in PHP

Question

header("Content-Type: text/csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=file.csv");

function outputCSV($data) {
  $output = fopen("php://output", "wb");
  foreach ($data as $row)
    fputcsv($output, $row); // here you can change delimiter/enclosure
  fclose($output);
}

outputCSV(array(
  array("name 1", "age 1", "city 1"),
  array("name 2", "age 2", "city 2"),
  array("name 3", "age 3", "city 3")
));

php://output
fputcsv

Try:

header("Content-type: text/csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=file.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");

echo "record1,record2,record3\n";
die;

etc

Edit: Here's a snippet of code I use to optionally encode CSV fields:

function maybeEncodeCSVField($string) {
    if(strpos($string, ',') !== false || strpos($string, '"') !== false || strpos($string, "\n") !== false) {
        $string = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $string) . '"';
    }
    return $string;
}

Here is an improved version of the function from php.net that @Andrew posted.

function download_csv_results($results, $name = NULL)
{
    if( ! $name)
    {
        $name = md5(uniqid() . microtime(TRUE) . mt_rand()). '.csv';
    }

    header('Content-Type: text/csv');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='. $name);
    header('Pragma: no-cache');
    header("Expires: 0");

    $outstream = fopen("php://output", "wb");

    foreach($results as $result)
    {
        fputcsv($outstream, $result);
    }

    fclose($outstream);
}

It is really easy to use and works great with MySQL(i)/PDO result sets.

download_csv_results($results, 'your_name_here.csv');

Remember to exit() after calling this if you are done with the page.

In addition to all already said, you might need to add:

header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: UTF-8");

It's very useful when handling files with multiple languages in them, like people's names, or cities.

The thread is a little old, I know, but for future reference and for noobs as myself:

Everyone else here explain how to create the CSV, but miss a basic part of the question: how to link. In order to link to download of the CSV-file, you just link to the .php-file, which in turn responds as being a .csv-file. The PHP headers do that. This enables cool stuff, like adding variables to the querystring and customize the output:

<a href="my_csv_creator.php?user=23&amp;othervariable=true">Get CSV</a>

my_csv_creator.php can work with the variables given in the querystring and for example use different or customized database queries, change the columns of the CSV, personalize the filename and so on, e.g.:

User_John_Doe_10_Dec_11.csv