scriptygoddess

This isn't exactly useful for blog stuff – but if you're using mySQL for a business application, then downloading your data into a CSV file (CSV = Comma Seperated Values) is probably something that might come in handy. The key that I've found is that you can have any kind of characters inside each field, so long as you surround the data with double quotes. Of course, that presents the problem of, if your data uses double quotes, it will kind of mess things up. The solution I came up with was to take the data in the field, and replace the double quotes with two double qoutes (this indicates that it's part of the data and not the end of the field.)

So here's what your code will look like (what I did was store all the data in a string, then write the string to a file – this demonstrates how I create that string):

$query = "SELECT field1, field2, field3 FROM tablename";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$num_results = mysql_num_rows($result);<br>
//write header row
$stringToWrite = "\"field1\"","\"field2\"',"\"field3\""\n";<br>
for ($i=0; $i<$num_results; $i++) {
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
$stringToWrite .= "\"".str_replace("\"", "\"\"",$row["field1"])."\",\"".str_replace("\"", "\"\"",$row["field2"])."\",\"".str_replace("\"", "\"\"",$row["field3"])."\"\n";
}