cannot send the email while attaching the excel sheet in php - php

Question

When i am trying to send an excel sheet as attachment in php, it shows that cannot access the file. But if i am commenting the attachment part, the mail will send perfectly. When i am trying to download the sheet it works perfectly.
Will anyone guide me how can i fix this problem?
Thank you
$select="select * from tablename";
$export = mysql_query($select);
$fields = mysql_num_fields($export);
$csv_output = '';
$data='';
for ($i = 0; $i < $fields; $i++) {
$csv_output .= mysql_field_name($export, $i) . "\t";
}
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($export)) {
$line = '';
foreach ($row as $value) {
if ((!isset($value)) OR ($value == "")) {
$value = "NULL\t";
} else {
$value = str_replace('"', '""', $value);
$value = '"' . $value . '"' . "\t";
}
$line .= $value;
}
$data .= trim($line) . "\n";
}
$data = str_replace("\r", "", $data);
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
$mail = new PHPMailer(true);
try {
$mail->SMTPDebug = 2;
$mail->isSMTP();
$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$mail->Username ='xxxx#gmail.com';
$mail->Password = 'password';
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';
$mail->Port = 587;
$mail->setFrom('xxxxx#gmail.com', 'name');
$mail->addAddress('xxxxx#gmail.com', 'name');
$mail->addAttachment($csv_output . "\n" . $data);
$mail->isHTML(true);
$mail->Subject = 'Report';
$mail->Body = '<b>Please find the attachment of the Report</b>';
$mail->AltBody = 'Please find the attachement of the Report';
$mail->send();
echo 'Message has been sent';
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo "Message could not be sent. Mailer Error: {$mail->ErrorInfo}";
}

Answer 1

addAttachment expects a path to a file, not raw attachment content. Easiest fix would be to store your attachment content to a temporary file and then give the path to that.
So instead of:
$mail->addAttachment($csv_output . "\n" . $data);
You could do something like:
$report_filename = date('Y-m-d-his-').'-report.txt';
file_put_contents($report_filename, $csv_output . "\n" . $data);
$mail->addAttachment($report_filename);
//....
$mail->send();
unlink($report_filename);