Trying to automatically open a dynamically generated CSV file from PHP script? - php

Question

I'm successfully getting the desired output in console, but the browser isn't automatically downloading the CSV file.
header('Content-Type: application/csv');
$filename = 'Totals Report for ' . $name . ' All-Time.csv';
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'";');
$output = fopen('php://output', 'rb');
// output the column headings
fputcsv($output, array('Procedure Name', 'Totals'));
foreach ($rows as $row){
fputcsv($output, $row);
}
fopen($filename);
fclose($output);

Answer 1

A sample wich running in my browser:
$csv= '"Procedure Name", Totals'."\n";
$rows= array(
array('aaa', 'bbb'),
array('123', '456')
);
foreach ($rows as $row){
$csv .= implode(",",$row)."\n";
}
$filename= 'Totals Report for '.$name.' All-Time.csv';
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'";');
die($csv);

Answer 2

Bah, this got unruly in the comments. I took it a step further and made it loop through the values too!
// Set headers
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
$filename = 'Totals Report for ' . $name . ' All-Time.csv';
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'";');
// Column titles
echo 'Procedure Name,Totals' . "\n"; // Don't forget the newlines!
// Data
foreach ($rows as $row) {
foreach ($row as $index => $value) {
echo $value;
if ($index < count($row) - 1) {
echo ',';
}
}
echo "\n";
}
You could also buffer it into a file so you can use fputcsv. That would work almost exactly as your current code, but at the end you'd have echo file_get_contents($the_buffer_file);
The main point is that all you need to do is output your data in CSV format, i.e. separate values by commas and a new line is a new row. It would also be smart to escape the values with quotation marks (not shown in my code).