I guess every web developer has ever had a situation when he needed to get the dump of MySQL table but standard tools like phpMyAdmin or mysqldump were unavailable, but you had an ability to run PHP script. Some days ago I had similar situation and now I want to share this solution with you.

First of all, let’s get the table structure. It’s more simpler.

$sql = "show create table test_table";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
$data = mysql_fetch_assoc($res);
echo $data['Create Table'];

This PHP script prints SQL string for ‘test_table’ table creation.

And now let’s get the table data.

$sql = "select * from test_table";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
  $fields = array();
  $values = array();
  foreach ($row as $key => $value) {
    array_push($fields, addslashes($key));
    array_push($values, '\'' . addslashes($value) . '\'');
  }
  $fields = implode(', ', $fields);
  $values = implode(', ', $values);
  echo "insert into test_table ($fields) values ($values);\n";
}

Note, if the table contains a lot of data, you will need to call set_time_limit(0) function.

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