PHP - Joel Lipman .Com

Outputting PHP files into different file formats

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 12 February 2010; Hits: 4219

I'm beginning a list as I've just spent an age trying to get PHP output to create a text file. Then my client showed me how she then opens the text file in Excel, so I said we could get the script to do that instead.

PHP to TXT

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header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

PHP to XLS

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$export_file = "my_name.xls"; 
ob_end_clean(); 
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off'); 
header('Pragma: public'); 
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); 
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none'); 
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;'); 
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");  
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');

$export_file = "my_name.xls";
ob_end_clean();
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off');
header('Pragma: public');
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT');
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none');
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;');
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');

Category: Personal Home Page :: Article: 240

Converting SQL date in PHP to European date format and vice-versa

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 17 September 2009; Hits: 8032

The Issue

If you've ever made PHP scripts to process data within a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) then this happens a lot. In the following example, our HTML form will allow the user to specify a date (so excludes hours, minutes and seconds). For demonstration purposes, I'm going to be using the European date format so DD/MM/YYYY.

The Solution

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 17 September 2009; Hits: 6581

The Issue

Basically you have a HTML form with an input field type of 'FILE' (ie. <input type="file" name="file_to_upload" />) and want a PHP file to process this. This example applies to a Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) environment.

The Solution
1. The first thing to do is check that your HTML form is setup to do this:

: Joel Lipman; Personal Home Page; 06 September 2009; Hits: 5217

I added this article because when I was only trying to look up how to do this, this nut "the Storyteller" went and carried out a benchmark test on the most popular ways of counting the occurrence of a specific word within a string of text.