Write CSV To File Without Enclosures In PHP

Question

Is there a native function or solid class/library for writing an array as a line in a CSV file without enclosures? fputcsv will default to " if nothing is passed in for the enclosure param. Google is failing me (returning results for a whole bunch of pages about fputcsv), and PEAR's libraries do more or less the same things as fputcsv.

Something that works exactly like fputcsv, but will allow the fields to remain unquoted.

currently: "field 1","field 2",field3hasNoSpaces

desired: field 1,field 2,field3hasNoSpaces

Answer 1

The warnings about foregoing enclosures are valid, but you've said they don't apply to your use-case.

I'm wondering why you can't just use something like this?

<?php
$fields = array(
    "field 1","field 2","field3hasNoSpaces"
);
fputs(STDOUT, implode(',', $fields)."\n");

Answer 2

works with chr() function:

fputcsv($f,$array,',',chr(0));

Answer 3

fputcsv($file, $data, ';', chr(127));

Answer 4

Well car(0) didn't work out as the NULL value will most likely choke most csv parsers.

I ended using fputcsv() to build the initial file, then went through and removed all quotes. Elegant? Maybe not, but it got the job done :).

Answer 5

<?php       
    
$filename = "sample.csv";
$handle = fopen($filename, 'w+');
fputcsv($handle, ['column 1','column 2']);
$data = ['sample','data'];

fputs($handle, implode(',', $data)."\n");

// or

fwrite($handle, implode(',', $data)."\n");

fclose($handle);
$headers = array(
    'Content-Type' => 'text/csv',
);

Answer 6

Doesn't this work?

fputcsv($fp, split(',', $line),',',' ');

Answer 7

This is what I use to put standard CSV into an array...

function csv_explode($delim=',', $str, $enclose='"', $preserve=false){
        $resArr = array();
        $n = 0;
        $expEncArr = explode($enclose, $str);
        foreach($expEncArr as $EncItem){
                if($n++%2){
                        array_push($resArr, array_pop($resArr) . ($preserve?$enclose:'') . $EncItem.($preserve?$enclose:''));
                }else{
                        $expDelArr = explode($delim, $EncItem);
                        array_push($resArr, array_pop($resArr) . array_shift($expDelArr));
                        $resArr = array_merge($resArr, $expDelArr);
                }
        }
        return $resArr;
} 

You can then output whatever you want in a foreach loop.

Answer 8

The downside with a CSV file with no enclosures means an errant comma in user input will munge the row. So you'll need to remove commas before writing a CSV row.

The tricky part with handling CSV is parsing enclosures, which makes the PHP & PEAR CSV functions valuable. Essentially you're looking for a file that is comma-delimited for columns and newline-delimited for rows. Here's a simple starting point:

<?php
$col_separator= ',';
$row_separator= "\n";

$a= array(
 array('my', 'values', 'are', 'awes,breakit,ome'),
 array('these', 'values', 'also', "rock\nAND\nROLL")
);

function encodeRow(array $a) {
 global $col_separator;
 global $row_separator;
 // Can't have the separators in the column data!
 $a2= array();
 foreach ($a as $v) {
  $a2[]= str_replace(array($col_separator, $row_separator), '', $v);
 }
 return implode($col_separator, $a2);
}

$output= array();
foreach ($a as $row) {
 $output[]= encodeRow($row);
}

echo(implode($row_separator, $output));

?>

Answer 9

I use tricky way to remove double quote, but only in Linux

....
fputcsv($fp, $product_data,"\t");
....
shell_exec('sed -i \'s/"//g\' /path/to/your-file.txt ');

Answer 10

Whats wrong with good old fwrite()?

function encloseString($field){
    return ($field) ? '"' . $field . '"' : null;
}

$delimiter = ';';
$data = ["data_field_1", "data_field_2", "data_field_3"];

$fp = fopen("some-file.csv", 'w');

for($i = 0;$i<100000;$i++) {
    fwrite($fp, implode($delimiter, array_map('encloseString', $data) . "\n");
}

fclose($fp);

(Obviously you need to make sure the data in $data is escaped first)

Answer 11

Chose the solution depends on your application. For some case own code for csv is needed. In case 1 (See result chr0), case 2 (chr127) and case 3 (chr127) the data will be modified(bad thing). Instead use something like this, thanks @oops:

<?php
$fields = array("field 1","field 2","field3hasNoSpaces");
fputs(STDOUT, implode(',', $fields)."\n");

• case 1. fputcsv($f, $array, $delimiter, car(0)) See result chr0
• case 2. fputcsv($f, $array, $delimiter, car(127)) chr127
• case 3. fputcsv($f, $array, $delimiter, ' ') onespace
• case 4. Own code (s.above inspired by oops or Ansyori or zeros-and-ones ) produces better results.

Answer 12

This is an old question but as I was struggling with this as well, I thought it would be good to let anyone who is looking for something like this know than you can just pass empty string in the enclosure param of fputcsv and it will not use any enclosure at all.

i.e.

fputcsv($file, $array, ',', '');

Answer 13

chr(0) also worked for me:

 fputcsv($fp, $aLine, $sDelimiter, chr(0));

Answer 14

Figured it out. By passing in the ascii code for Null to the car() function it seems to work just fine.

fputcsv($f, $array, $delimiter, car(0))

Thanks for the answers everyone!!!