Textarea output with HTML formatting

@Hube02

The output will be in tabular format, and it's important that user be able to Ctrl-A the contents of the "output box" and copy-paste the contents into Microsoft Excel, for example, as a spreadsheet.

Would this work for the solution your suggest?

Alternatively, can you provide buttons to automatically download the contents of your solution into a CSV or Text file on the client computer, for later import to Excel, etc?

This file download feature may be done with a PHP script.   If so, can you explain how to do this?

Well, I just tried putting a table into a textarea, and it doesn't work, so that's out.

As far as copying the text/table format out of the div to be pasted into Excel, I haven't got a clue, it doesn't seem to work when I try it.

Sorry, your original question did not say anything about needing to be able to copy/past out of the page and I don't know how this would be done.

@Hube02

Your suggestion works fine, but doesn't meet the Ctrl-A and copy-paste requirements mentioned above.  This is because Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox show different behaviors regarding copy-paste from the output DIV, as follows:

IE:
Can manually select by mouse the tabular contents of the output DIV, and copy-paste into Excel works as expected.  Ctrl-A in the output DIV selects the entire page.

Firefox:
Can manually select by mouse the tabular contents of the output DIV, but the copy-paste into Excel, doesn't work because the entire contents is pasted as one continuous string into the selected cell in Excel, as opposed to being correctly distributed to cells in tabular format.  Ctrl-A in the output DIV selects the entire page.

So again, if one can provide buttons to automatically download the contents of the output DIV into a CSV or Text file on the client computer, for later import to Excel, that would be one complete solution.

Is there a way to do this, with PHP for example?

@Hube02

I probably started composing my post # 25379547 before you posted your # 25379512 ... I see you don't know how to do the CSV or Text file export.

I do know how to to a CVS or a Text file output. You would simply need to format your data for that use. Then, instead of sending with AJAX you would need a link to the file that would generate the file and send it.

To create a CVS file and force download you would send the following headers.... Below are the headers I send with PHP when I force download a file in one of my applications. The code below is at the end of a file where I am creating an Excel file for download. The data itself is simply comma delimited.

Put fields in ""
if there are " in a filed then escape them by making them double ""
separate fields with a comma
separate lines with \r\n

You can get more info here: http://www.ryboe.com/tutorials/php-headers-force-download and http://www.askageek.com/2006/02/28/generate-a-csv-file-using-php/

header('Pragma: public'); // required
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Cache-Control: private',false); // required for certain browsers
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel');
$date = date('Y_m_d');
$filename = 'production_log_'.$date.'.xls';
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.$filename.';' );
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($output));
echo $output;
exit;
                                              

1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
11:
12: