What are common challenges faced when converting HTML tables to CSV files in PHP, and how can they be overcome?

One common challenge when converting HTML tables to CSV files in PHP is properly handling special characters and formatting inconsistencies. To overcome this, you can use the PHP function `strip_tags()` to remove any HTML tags and `fputcsv()` to write the data to the CSV file while handling special characters. 

// Sample HTML table data
$htmlTable = '<table><tr><th>Name</th><th>Age</th></tr><tr><td>John Doe</td><td>25</td></tr></table>';

// Remove HTML tags and extract data
$tableData = [];
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($htmlTable);
$rows = $dom->getElementsByTagName('tr');
foreach ($rows as $row) {
    $rowData = [];
    $cells = $row->getElementsByTagName('td');
    foreach ($cells as $cell) {
        $rowData[] = $cell->nodeValue;
    }
    $tableData[] = $rowData;
}

// Write data to CSV file
$csvFile = fopen('table_data.csv', 'w');
foreach ($tableData as $row) {
    fputcsv($csvFile, $row);
}
fclose($csvFile);

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