Outputting Query to Textfile - php

Question

I have this code (which thanks to the users of stackoverflow I got the markup I needed :) ). However, I have come to a road that I have no knowledge of what so ever. I need to output this formatted table of the query to a text file on the server.
<?php
// Make a MySQL Connection
mysql_connect("hostname.net", "user", "pass") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("database") or die(mysql_error());
// Get all the data from the "example" table
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM cards ORDER BY card_id")
or die(mysql_error());
echo "";
echo " Name AgeTitlebar ";
// keeps getting the next row until there are no more to get
while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )) {
// Print out the contents of each row into a table
echo "";
echo $row['card_id'];
echo "";
echo $row['title'];
echo "";
echo $row['item_bar'];
echo "";
}
echo "";
?>
I know I could use something similar to
<?php
$myFile = "test.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
$stringData = "Bobby Bopper\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);
?>
but I am sure that it cant be the best solution. So I guess my question is does anyone know how to achieve this?

Answer 1

The nicest solution, particularly if you are short on memory, would be to put the writing into the loop:
$fh = fopen('cards.csv', 'w');
// keeps getting the next row until there are no more to get
while($row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )) {
fputcsv($fh, array($row['card_id'], $row['title'], $row['item_bar']), "\t");
}
fclose('cards.csv');
Note that I have used fputcsv to output the data in CSV format (using a tab as the delimiter). This should be easy to read by hand, and will also be easily understood by, for instance, a spreadsheet program. If you preferred a custom format, you should use fwrite as in your question.

Answer 2

Have a look at:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/select.html
especially:
[INTO OUTFILE 'file_name' export_options
| INTO DUMPFILE 'file_name'
| INTO var_name [, var_name]]

Answer 3

Something like this?
// Make sure the file exists, do some checks.
// Loop trough result set and append anything to the file.
while (false !== ($aRow = mysql_fetch_assoc($rResult))) {
$sCreateString = $aRow['field1'].';'.$aRow['field2'];
file_put_contents('example.txt', $sCreateString, FILE_APPEND);
}
// Done
If you need an exact dump of the database table, there are better options. (much better actually).

Answer 4

If you want to write a text file, then there's nothing wrong with what you've suggested.
There's lots of information in the PHP manual: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php
It depends entirely on how you want to store the data inside the file. You can create your own flat-file database format if you wish, and extract the data using PHP once you've read in the file.