Issue generating .xls since changing from PHP 5 to PHP 7 - mysqli

Question

I've recently switched from PHP 5.6 to PHP7. A previous PHP script which worked fine in PHP 5.6 is now duplicating columns data in PHP 7. I'm not seeing why. The code:
function cleanData(&$str)
{
$str = preg_replace("/\t/", "\t", $str);
$str = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\n", $str);
if(strstr($str, '"')) $str = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $str) . '"';
// force certain number/date formats to be imported as strings
if(preg_match("/^0/", $str) || preg_match("/^+?\d{8,}$/", $str) || preg_match("/^\d{4}.\d{1,2}.\d{1,2}/", $str))
{
$str = "'$str";
}
}
$day_num = date(d);
$month_num = date(n);
$year_num = date(Y);
// file name for download
$filename = "Subscriber_list_" . $month_num . "-" . $day_num . "-" . $year_num . ".xls";
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=\"$filename\"");
header('Cache-Control: max-age=0');
echo "ID \t Title \t First Name \t Last Name \t E-Mail \n";
$news_query = mysqli_query("SELECT DISTINCT id, title,firstname, lastname, email FROM users WHERE newsletter = 1 ");
while($row =mysqli_fetch_array($news_query, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
array_walk($row, 'cleanData');
echo implode("\t", array_values($row)) . "\n";
}
exit;
The DB is fairly standard. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I think this is because you're using the MYSQL_ASSOC constant instead of MYSQLI_ASSOC when you fetch rows from the query.
That typo happened to work when you were on PHP 5, because those two constants have the same value. But the MYSQL_ASSOC constant is undefined in PHP 7 since the MYSQL extension has been removed, so mysqli_fetch_array goes with the default behavior of fetching both numeric and associative keys, hence the duplicated columns.

Answer 2

This is solved, Thanks.
I re-wrote the script using:
<pre>
function fetch_assoc($result) {
return mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
}
</pre>