Export CSV for Excel

Question

I'm writing a CSV file in PHP using fputcsv($file, $data) . It all works, however I can't just open it in Excel but have to import it and specify the encoding and which delimiter to use (in a wizard). I've seen exports from other websites that open correctly just by clicking on them and now would like to know what I should do to my file to achieve that.

I tried using this library: http://code.google.com/p/parsecsv-for-php/ But I couldn't even get it to run and am not really confident if it would really help me...

Answer 1

This is how I make Excel readable CSV files from PHP :

• Add BOM to fix UTF-8 in Excel
• Set semi-colon (;) as delimeter
• Set correct header ("Content-Type: text/csv; charset=utf-8")

For exemple :

$headers = array('Lastname :', 'Firstname :');
$rows = array(
    array('Doe', 'John'),
    array('Schlüter', 'Rudy'),
    array('Alvarez', 'Niño')
);

// Create file and make it writable

$file = fopen('file.csv', 'w');

// Add BOM to fix UTF-8 in Excel

fputs($file, $bom = (chr(0xEF) . chr(0xBB) . chr(0xBF)));

// Headers
// Set ";" as delimiter

fputcsv($file, $headers, ";");

// Rows
// Set ";" as delimiter

foreach ($rows as $row) {

    fputcsv($file, $row, ";");
}

// Close file

fclose($file);

// Send file to browser for download

$dest_file = 'file.csv';
$file_size = filesize($dest_file);

header("Content-Type: text/csv; charset=utf-8");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=\"file.csv\"");
header("Content-Length: " . $file_size);
readfile($dest_file);

Works with Excel 2013.

Answer 2

this is really a mess. You surely can use the sep=; or sep=, or sep=\\t or whatever to make Excel aware of a separator used in your CSV. Just put this string at the beginning of your CSV contents. Eg:

fwrite($handle, "sep=,\n");

fputcsv($handle,$yourcsvcontent);

This works smoothly. BUT, it doesn't work in combination with a BOM which is required to make Excel aware of UTF-8 in case you need to support special characters or MB respectively.

In the end to make it bullet-proof you need to read out users locale and set the Separator accordingly, as mentioned above. Put a BOM ("\\xEF\\xBB\\xBF") at the begining of your CSV content, then write the CSV like eg: fputcsv($handle, $fields, $user_locale_seperator); where $user_locale_seperator is the separtator you retrieved by checking the user's locale. Not comfortable but it works...

Answer 3

Despite the "C=comma" in CVS, Excel uses your locale native separator. So supposing fputcsv always uses a comma, it won't work, if your locale separator is for example a semicolon.

What Google AdSense does, when you click "Export to Excel CSV" , is that it uses Tab as a separator. And that works.

To replicate that, set the third parameter ( delimiter ) of fputcsv to override the default comma. Eg for Tab use: fputcsv($handle, $fields, "\\t");

Compare the format of the CSV that works for you against the one generated by fputcsv .

Consider including example of both in your question. You might get better answers.

Answer 4

You may have an encoding issue.

Try this post:

http://onwebdev.blogspot.com.es/2010/10/php-encoding-of-csv-file-for-excel.html

Answer 5

I notice that you need to consider: Content-Type header BOM (Byte Order Mark) Actual character encoding in the file

With BOM (works):

$bom = pack("CCC", 0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF);
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Length: '.(strlen($csv)+strlen($bom)));
header('Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=my.csv');
echo $bom;
echo $csv;

Without BOM (works but you need to replace “smart quotes” then run utf8_decode on each value or cell, and it converts some characters, for example FRĒ is converted to FRE')

header('Content-Type: application/csv;charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($csv));
header('Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=my.csv');
echo $csv;

If the wrong combination of charset and BOM are used, it just comes out wrong when opening in MS Excel.

Bonus fact: mb_strlen tells you the number of characters, strlen tells you the number of bytes. You do NOT want to use mb_strlen for calculating the Content-Length header.

Bonus 2: replace microsoft "smart" characters (em dash, curly quotes, etc):

$map = array(chr(145) => "'"
            ,chr(146) => "'"
            ,chr(147) => '"'
            ,chr(148) => '"'
            ,chr(149) => '-'
            ,chr(150) => '-'
            ,chr(151) => '-'
            ,chr(152) => '-'
            ,chr(152) => '-'
            ,chr(171) => '-'
            ,chr(187) => '-'
);
// faster that strtr
return str_replace( array_keys($map), $map, $str );