Exporting CSV with UTF8 to Excel using PHP - php

Question

my client asked me to build an export system that export the whole SQL database into csv file that works on excel. I found PHPexcel and it's great, but I thought I can do stuff way more easier and faster using my own functions.
After struggling with Excel encoding, I finally succeeded to export the CSV that will work on Excel using the following code:
<?php
$data = showData("price"); //Function that loads all the SQL database into an array.
function array2csv(array &$array)
{
if (count($array) == 0) {
return null;
}
ob_start();
$df = fopen("php://output", 'w');
fputcsv($df, array_keys(reset($array)));
foreach ($array as $row) {
fputcsv($df, $row);
}
fclose($df);
return ob_get_clean();
}
function download_send_headers($filename) {
// disable caching
$now = gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s");
header("Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate");
header("Last-Modified: {$now} GMT");
header ( 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' );
header ( 'Date: ' . date ( 'D M j G:i:s T Y' ) );
header ( 'Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel') ;
header ( 'Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=export.csv' );
}
download_send_headers("export.csv");
$final = array2csv($data);
print chr(255) . chr(254) . mb_convert_encoding($final, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
die();
?>
The problem is that when I try to open the file in Excel there are no columns. Each row is a large column that contains the whole data of the specific row, separated by a comma.
I figured out that I would need to replace those commas with something that Excel can read as a "new column". But I still need to keep my CSV to work as it is.
I searched SO and Google with no luck whatsoever finding a solution that will keep my CSV intact and yet split the data into columns Excel. If there is no way to do both, I think the more important thing to my client is that the Excel version will work as it should (each row separated into columns).
This is a picture of how it looks on CSV (using numbers on Mac)
And this is a picture of how it looks on Excel 2007 on Windows

Answer 1

It's all in the fputcsv() function:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php
Try to choose the correct $delimiter, $enclosure and $escape_char.
The default character that is used as the field-separator in excel is set by the locale settings. That means: Importing CVS files can be language dependent. Export to CSV from excel to see what it does on your system, and check that your client system has the same settings.
It's better to export to XML instead of CSV, because that will circumvent this problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats