CodeIgniter 2 Cookbook

Generating a CSV from a database result

Perhaps one of the most common things you'll be asked to do, especially if you are building a complex application that may have users, products, orders, and various other metrics is to provide some sort of reporting of that data. Perhaps you'll be asked to generate a CSV file, and the following sections show how you do it.

Getting ready

Firstly, we need to create a table and enter some example data so that you'll see some data in the CSV format, so with that in mind, copy the following code into SQL:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `users` ( `user_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `user_first_name` varchar(125) NOT NULL, `user_last_name` varchar(125) NOT NULL, `user_email` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `user_created_date` ...