Is there any way to take a mysql database and saving it to disk other than saving all the data and structure as a .txt file or xml file through PHPMyAdmin? Maybe as a spreadsheet or as any other format that is easier to read than the txt file?

Well, in theory that's what the CSV (comma separated values)functionality is for. Exporting to that will allow you to import into say, Excel or other applications.

My suggestion is upgrade to PHPMyAdmin 2.5.1 or later. That version has the CSV functionality built into it. As far as how good it is, I dunno. I haven't fooled with it.

hth,
: )
Rich

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Smiling Souls
http://www.smilingsouls.net
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You can also just hijack the source of phpMyAdmin to extract what you need. The code there works well -- if you just want to write a small script to do a specific task, that's a good place to start.

It's not terribly hard to write your own script to do it on your own though. For example, here's pseudocode for outputting all your table data into an HTML page:

For each table in the database,
   Output a heading for that table.
   Begin an HTML table.
   For each column in that table,
      Output a table header cell for that column.
   Select * from that table.
   For each row in the result set,
      For each column in the result row,
          Output a table cell for that column.

Simple!


Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/