PHP Array to CSV

Question

Instead of writing out values consider using fputcsv().

This may solve your problem immediately.

Note from comment: I should mention that this will be making a file on your server, so you'll need to read that file's contents before outputting it, also if you don't want to save a copy then you'll need to ùnlink`the file when you are done

This is a simple solution that exports an array to csv string:

function array2csv($data, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $escape_char = "\\")
{
    $f = fopen('php://memory', 'r+');
    foreach ($data as $item) {
        fputcsv($f, $item, $delimiter, $enclosure, $escape_char);
    }
    rewind($f);
    return stream_get_contents($f);
}

$list = array (
    array('aaa', 'bbb', 'ccc', 'dddd'),
    array('123', '456', '789'),
    array('"aaa"', '"bbb"')
);
var_dump(array2csv($list));

Reference

Try using;

PHP_EOL

To terminate each new line in your CSV output.

I'm assuming that the text is delimiting, but isn't moving to the next row?

That's a PHP constant. It will determine the correct end of line you need.

Windows, for example, uses "\r\n". I wracked my brains with that one when my output wasn't breaking to a new line.

how to write unified new line in PHP?

In my case, my array was multidimensional, potentially with arrays as values. So I created this recursive function to blow apart the array completely:

function array2csv($array, &$title, &$data) {
    foreach($array as $key => $value) {      
        if(is_array($value)) {
            $title .= $key . ",";
            $data .= "" . ",";
            array2csv($value, $title, $data);
        } else {
            $title .= $key . ",";
            $data .= '"' . $value . '",';
        }
    }
}

Since the various levels of my array didn't lend themselves well to a the flat CSV format, I created a blank column with the sub-array's key to serve as a descriptive "intro" to the next level of data. Sample output:

agentid     fname           lname      empid    totals  sales   leads   dish    dishnet top200_plus top120  latino  base_packages
G-adriana   ADRIANA EUGENIA PALOMO PAIZ 886                0    19              0         0         0         0      0

You could easily remove that "intro" (descriptive) column, but in my case I had repeating column headers, i.e. inbound_leads, in each sub-array, so that gave me a break/title preceding the next section. Remove:

$title .= $key . ",";
$data .= "" . ",";

after the is_array() to compact the code further and remove the extra column.

Since I wanted both a title row and data row, I pass two variables into the function and upon completion of the call to the function, terminate both with PHP_EOL:

$title .= PHP_EOL;
$data .= PHP_EOL;

Yes, I know I leave an extra comma, but for the sake of brevity, I didn't handle it here.

I know this is old, I had a case where I needed the array key to be included in the CSV also, so I updated the script by Jesse Q to do that. I used a string as output, as implode can't add new line (new line is something I added, and should really be there).

Please note, this only works with single value arrays (key, value). but could easily be updated to handle multi-dimensional (key, array()).

function arrayToCsv( array &$fields, $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $encloseAll = false, $nullToMysqlNull = false ) {
    $delimiter_esc = preg_quote($delimiter, '/');
    $enclosure_esc = preg_quote($enclosure, '/');

    $output = '';
    foreach ( $fields as $key => $field ) {
        if ($field === null && $nullToMysqlNull) {
            $output = '';
            continue;
        }

        // Enclose fields containing $delimiter, $enclosure or whitespace
        if ( $encloseAll || preg_match( "/(?:${delimiter_esc}|${enclosure_esc}|\s)/", $field ) ) {
            $output .= $key;
            $output .= $delimiter;
            $output .= $enclosure . str_replace($enclosure, $enclosure . $enclosure,     $field) . $enclosure;
            $output .= PHP_EOL;
        }
        else {
            $output .= $key;
            $output .= $delimiter;
            $output .= $field;
            $output .= PHP_EOL;
        }
    }

    return  $output ;
}

Arrays of data are converted into csv 'text/csv' format by built in php function fputcsv takes care of commas, quotes and etc..
Look at
https://coderwall.com/p/zvzwwa/array-to-comma-separated-string-in-php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php