Exporting data into Excel file using PHP - php

Question

My problem looks like this at the front side:
After choosing which of my users I want to export:
I'm sending AJAX request containing their database ids to external file named exportUsers.php.
So this is how back end of my problem looks like:
When data arrive to exportUsers.php, I query the database and make array($data) like this, which I want to export into Excel file.
This is how i tried to trigger download:
function cleanData(&$str)
{
$str = preg_replace("/\t/", "\\t", $str);
$str = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\\n", $str);
if(strstr($str, '"')) $str = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $str) . '"';
}
$flag = false;
foreach($data as $row1) {
if(!$flag) {
// display field/column names as first row
echo implode("\t", array_keys($row1)) . "\r\n";
$flag = true;
}
array_walk($row, __NAMESPACE__ . '\cleanData');
echo implode("\t", array_values($row1)) . "\r\n";
}
$filename = "users_data" . date('Ymd') . ".xls";
header("Content-Type: application/xls");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
But this is all I see in Network tool of my browser:
But no download was triggered. Please help

Answer 1

Try this
session_start();
include "connection.php";
$sql= mysql_query("select * from table") or die(print "Failed Download :".mysql_error());
$columns_total = mysql_num_fields($sql);
// Get The Field Name
for ($i = 0; $i < $columns_total; $i++) {
$heading = mysql_field_name($sql, $i);
$output .= '"'.$heading.'",';
}
$output .="\n";
// Get Records from the table
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql)) {
for ($i = 0; $i < $columns_total; $i++) {
$output .='"'.$row["$i"].'",';
}
$output .="\n";
}
// Download the file
$filename = "FileName.xls";
header('Content-type: application/xls');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.$filename);
echo $output;
//jzend...
exit;
?>