Problem extracting DB contains to EXCEL

mekh · March 29th, 2004, 12:37 PM

Hi guys,
I can't understand why \n & \t are not working in my PHP server. Its burdening me to extract the mysql datas into EXCEL format in right format but all the data goes to A1. Even
<?php
echo "This is first line \n";
echo "This is second line...";
?>
Is in single line....
Is there anything to do with php.ini, I checked it every step but i can't get any line related to it...

Thank you
Mekh

nikolai · March 29th, 2004, 04:41 PM

It's an HTML setting. HTML treats all consecutive whitespace as a single whitespace character. That allows you to write properly nested and "pretty" HTML that doesn't span way too far to the right of a text editor.

If you want to view newlines, then use a <br /> tag (line break).

If your newlines are already in your text, use the nl2br() function to add a <br /> tag to all \n newlines:

echo nl2br("This is the first line.\nThis is the second...");

http://www.php.net/nl2br

Here's a very recent thread which addresses your question:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11219

Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/

mekh · March 30th, 2004, 01:09 PM

Thanks Nik,

Well its working well with \n using <br /> but I actually need is \t which dump all data to one row/col in spreadsheet.
In the next thread its replaced by using  . I don't think that will tab my data to next col.

Thank you,
Mekh

mekh dev gurung

richard.york · March 30th, 2004, 04:20 PM

Are you just wanting to be able to indent text?

Code:

// Query stuff

// No Carriage returns.  Remove extra newlines.  Put HTML at newlines.
// Append and Prepend HTML.  Fix quotes.
$data['body'] = preg_replace('/[\\r]/', '', $data['body']);
$data['body'] = preg_replace('[\\n]', "\n</p>\n<p class='submissionbody'>\n", $data['body']);

// The &nbsp; character will keep the line size
$data['body'] = preg_replace('/(\<p)(\\040)(class\=\'submissionbody\'\>)(\\n{1,})?(\\040{1,})?(\\n{1,})?(\<\/p\>)/', "<p class='submissionempty'>\n&nbsp;\n</p>", $data['body']);

$data['body'] = "<p class='submissionbody'>".$data['body']."</p>";
$data['body'] = stripslashes($data['body']);

$data['body'] = "<div class='submission'>".$data['body']."</div>";

echo $data['body'];

I like this method because it allows everything to be controlled with CSS. It offers a slightly more flexible approach than using the   for tabs or the plain nl2br function. It also properly formats the paragraphs -- using spacing properties instead of HTML and puts text inside of paragraph tags. This method is still experimental for me, but I've found it works in 99% of user-submitted texts.

Throw in a few CSS rules to format..

p.submissionbody {
text-indent: 20px;
}
p.submissionbody:first-letter {
text-transform: uppercase;
}

: )
Rich

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

nikolai · March 30th, 2004, 05:28 PM

I just posted this in another thread. If you're using PHP to generate
text that looks pretty in a web page, then you'll need to fudge newlines
and tabs using non-breaking spaces. If you're using PHP to generate text
to be inserted into a spreadsheet (using CSV formatting), then obviously
your HTML hacks won't be appropriate.

First figure out what format you want to generate and generate it. Like
I said in the other thread, you can have your PHP script generate different
output from the same input data.

Other thread:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11219

Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/