I previously posted this method for Mootools, and now here it is for jQuery.
Clients often ask to have a sorted list exportable via a link to a CSV file that they can open in Excel or whatever spreadsheet software they use. I could find two jQuery plugins for exporting table data to Excel, but I wasn’t comfortable with their reliance on producing popups (that could easily be blocked), or sending data as a querystring to a javascript function that sorts and formats the CSV. Here is a simple, plugin free way of asynchronously generating a .csv file using jQuery and PHP.