Creating a CSV File from a string using PhpSpreadsheet - php

Question

Is this possible? or must one use a PHP library such as thephpleague/csv?
Example, according to PhpSpreadsheet's documentation:
$reader = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Reader\Csv();
$spreadsheet = $reader->load($file);
$writer = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Csv($spreadsheet);
$writer->setUseBOM(true);
$writer->setDelimiter(',');
$writer->setEnclosure('');
$writer->setLineEnding("\r\n");
$writer->setSheetIndex(0);
$writer->save('test.csv');
As you can see this completely counter-productive as the load() method requires an actual $file to do essentially the same thing.
Is there a way to use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Csv() without using the spreadsheet and instead using a string containing CSV data?
Thanks in advance for all positive inputs and suggestions.

Answer 1

You don't need to load a file, you can create an empty Spreadsheet object directly by using
$spreadsheet = new PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Spreadsheet();
as shown in the "Hello World" example in the PHPSPreadsheet documentation
But if all you want to do is write a csv file; then you're far better using PHP's built-in fputcsv() function than a library designed to manipulate genuine spreadsheets with multiple worksheets, formatting, formulae, and working with multiple different file formats, etc.
Or for simply writing a string that's already concatenated (are you sure that you've quoted everything that needs quoting, and escaped everything that needs escaping), just use fwrite().
Counter-productive is building your own csv string and then using a spreadsheet library to write each line.