Use Laravel to Download table as CSV

I stumbled in here trying to see if Laravel had something built in by default – the answers for this question worry me a bit. I agree with @andré-daniel that the proper method is to not write a file first, but his implementation is manually putting together the values, which would fail if any value contained quotes, spaces, etc.

This is a more robust solution, using Laravel’s Response::stream and php’s fputcsv to format each line properly (will escape quotes, and quote necessary strings. see http://php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php for details)

<?php

public function download()
{
    $headers = [
            'Cache-Control'       => 'must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0'
        ,   'Content-type'        => 'text/csv'
        ,   'Content-Disposition' => 'attachment; filename=galleries.csv'
        ,   'Expires'             => '0'
        ,   'Pragma'              => 'public'
    ];

    $list = User::all()->toArray();

    # add headers for each column in the CSV download
    array_unshift($list, array_keys($list[0]));

   $callback = function() use ($list) 
    {
        $FH = fopen('php://output', 'w');
        foreach ($list as $row) { 
            fputcsv($FH, $row);
        }
        fclose($FH);
    };

    return response()->stream($callback, 200, $headers)
}