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

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 2

Doesn't this work?

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

Answer 3

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 4

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!!!

Answer 5

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 6

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 7

For automation you may want to consider, to find a more elegant way. :) chr(0) works perfectly for Froogle data feeds. Using " for enclosures just messes everything up for them. Thanks for the tip.