Export MySQL Query Results to CSV

I recently had to code a little web application that would interface with a MySQL database and display data on a webpage via PHP MySQL queries. The application had to support many international languages – the most difficult of which to deal with was Russian. Many forums suggested changing my character encoding to CP-1251, which is a standard Russian encoding in Windows. I needed support for all international languages, though, and using multiple character encodings wasn’t a headache I wanted to get myself into. It turns out that you can display all these characters using a UTF-8 encoding, provided you get the PHP and MySQL right.  Read on to find out how to display Russian and other languages with PHP and MySQL.

I’ve been very busy developing a couple projects over the past couple days, but here is a quick little trick to get around one of Drupal’s quirks. If you’re unfamiliar with Drupal, it’s a fantastic CMS (content management system) built on PHP and MySQL. For those blog-savvy among us, it is to general websites what WordPress is to blogs. I use Drupal to get sites up quickly and with great functionality, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to build powerful, custom websites without “re-inventing the wheel.”

Anyway, Drupal has this strange quirk in its source that creates a small grey border on the top of tables inserted in a page’s content.  A quick trip to my inspector revealed how to remove the top border from Drupal tables.  Simply add the following line to your CSS.

body tbody { border-top: none; }

All there is to it. 🙂