php export script question

[overlordofevil]

I am reading up on exporting data from mysql with php.

Everything I find tells me how to get all data so what I am wondering is there a way to set up a script to select specific data and have the system download it to a csv file.

 

To explain I am working on a db with multiple tables all tied together with a user id.

What I would like to do is do a search for all users tied to a specific group/department.

Take the id and get all the data for that user.

As the group/department id is only in one table and the user id is in all of them, i know i can run a query to get the ids I need but how would I run addition queries to get the data from the other table and have them exported to the file.

 

Since the queries would be in a loop going through all the tables with the specific id would it be possible to have the script write to the file and then continue to update.. is that possible?

 

I am sure i can figure this out but I am wondering if anyone else has worked on something like this and has some advice on what to watch out for while programing the script.

 

Any suggestion/advice is appreciated.

 

Thanks

Bill 

[premiso]

You may want to look into fputcsv as that seems like it would be right up your alley.

[jmajeremy]

If you only need to provide the file once, and not necessarily save it, you could keep concatenating the same variable, and finally output it to the client while specifying header("Content-type: text/csv");