Export sql postgres query to excel using php

Question

Hey guys I have this php application that i developing and i would like it to export the data correctly to the excel document such that each column header is exported with all the data in that column. This is what i have so far but its not working correctly as all the columns are shown in one row. How can i be able to achieve what i would like? Someone please assist me. This is the current implementation:

<?php require_once('connections/pgconn.php');


function cleanData(&$str)
{
$str = preg_replace("/\t/", "\\t", $str);
$str = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\\n", $str);
if(strstr($str, '"')) $str = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $str) . '"';
}

// filename for download
$filename = "website_data_" . date('Ymd') . ".xls";

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");

$flag = false;
$result = pg_query("SELECT to_char (a.CALLDATE,'yyyymm') as month,min(a.calldate) as      start_time,max(a.calldate) as end_time,
     ceil(SUM (a.CALLDURATION::integer) / 60) AS minutes,
     COUNT (DISTINCT a.IDENTIFIANT) AS distinct_callers,
a.zoneiddest as country_code,b.country
FROM cdr_data a,COUNTRY_CODES b
WHERE  a.CALLSUBCLASS = '002'
     AND  a.CALLCLASS = '008'
and a.zoneiddest::integer > 0
AND SUBSTR (a.CALLEDNUMBER, 1, 2) NOT IN
('77', '78', '75', '70', '71', '41', '31', '39', '76','79')

and not substr(a.zoneiddest , 1 ,3) in ('254','255','256','211','257','250','256')
and trim(a.zoneiddest)  = trim(b.country_code)
GROUP BY to_char (a.CALLDATE,'yyyymm') ,a.zoneiddest,b.country
ORDER BY 1") or die('Query failed!');

while(false !== ($row = pg_fetch_assoc($result))) {
if(!$flag) {
  // display field/column names as first row
  echo implode("\t", array_keys($row)) . "\r\n";
  $flag = true;
}
array_walk($row, 'cleanData');
echo implode("\t", array_values($row)) . "\r\n";
}
exit;
?>

Answer 1

What I would suggest is to export your query as CSV telling PHP to create a HTTP response as "application/ms-excel" content type so IE will automatically launch Excel that will import CSV in columns with column names:

$query = "COPY (SELECT .... ) TO '/path/reachable/with/php/file.csv' CSV;"

This way, you save the CSV as a file on the server and retrieve it as many time as you want in PHP.

$file = file_get_contents('/path/reachable/with/php/file.csv');
header('Content-Type: application/ms-excel');
echo $file;