Export MySql table to CSV? - php

Question

So, I have searched most of the answers here on stack and google and anywhere I could think of. There are plenty of answers indeed, but none have the structure I need.
Al my code looks like this:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE user_level = '$level' ORDER BY user_username DESC";
if ($stmt = $this->connect->prepare($sql)) {
$stmt->bind_result($id);
$stmt->execute();
while ($row = $stmt->fetch()) {
$stmt->bind_result($id);
$users[] = $id;
}
$stmt->close();
$length[] = sizeof($users);
} else {
$error = true;
$message['error'] = true;
$message['message'] = CANNOT_PREPARE_DATABASE_CONNECTION_MESSAGE;
return json_encode($message);
}
I'm using mysqli and stmt in all of my code, so I would like to keep it like this all the way.
So, I understand that I cannot have the CSV file where I have my action button to download it. But the thing is that my action button is part of a form, so I guess that instead of $_GET on the page I have the CSV I will have $_POST.
And my question, how do I loop through all database ( this needs to be depending on a column, a level ) and take all that data organized in a CSV file and than download it ? But this needs to be as the structure I have for my functions, I don't want to use db_query("SELECT * FROM {loreal_salons}"); per say or other like that.

Answer 1

Use the following :
// Setup the headers to force download of CSV
header("Content-type: application/csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=file.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
// loop your records here and output as comma separated
echo $row['col1'].",".$row['col3'].",".$row['col3']."\n";

Answer 2

If you want to loop over all the database, I think the key for what you want to do is :
SHOW TABLES - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/show-tables.html
.. to loop in all the tables
SHOW COLUMN - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/show-columns.html
.. to loop in all the column of a specific table