Download/export knowledge base articles from desk.com (for migration to Salesforce etc)

download.php

<?php
//Note that this is a quick and (very) dirty solution, but works so thought I'd share it :-)
//Usage: Complete $loginEmail, $loginPassword and $deskSubdomain and then run the script - it will access Desk for you and download to your browser a CSV of all the articles. Note that you'll need to download manually the images (attachments) etc.

function run_desk_api($endpoint, $data=array(), $method="POST") {
    $loginEmail = "";
    $loginPassword = "";
    $deskSubdomain = "";//the bit before desk.com when you're viewing articles etc
    
    $ch = curl_init('https://'.$deskSubdomain.'.desk.com/api/v2/'.$endpoint);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, $method);   
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
        "Content-Type: application/json",
        "Authorization: Basic ".base64_encode($loginEmail.":".$loginPassword)
        ));
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data));
    $response = json_decode(curl_exec($ch), true);
    unset($ch);unset($apiConfig);
    
    return $response;
}

//var_dump(run_desk_api("articles", array(), "GET"));die();

function getArticles() {
    return run_desk_api("articles", array("per_page"=>200, "page"=>1), "GET");
}

function processArticleField($f) {
    global $directDownload;
    $f = str_replace("/customer/portal/attachments/", "https://mangopay.desk.com/customer/portal/attachments/", $f);
    //$f = "<code>".$f."</code>";
    //$f = "<pre><code>".$f."</code></pre>";
    if (!$directDownload) {
        $f = "<script type='application/text'>".$f."</script>";
    }
    //$f = html_entity_decode($f);
    return $f;
}

$directDownload = true;

$articles = getArticles();

if (!$directDownload) {
?>
<style type="text/css">
    script {
        display: block;
    }
</style>
<?php
}

$headersDone = false;

if (!$directDownload) echo "<table>";

$outputData = array();

foreach($articles["_embedded"]["entries"] as $a) {
    
    $fieldsToHide = array("_links");
    
    if (!$headersDone) {
        $titleRow = array();
        if (!$directDownload) echo "<tr>";
        foreach($a as $f=>$v) {
            $shouldShowField = !in_array($f, $fieldsToHide);      
            if ($shouldShowField) {
                if ($directDownload) {
                    $titleRow[] = $f;
                }else{
                    echo "<th>$f</th>";
                }                
            }
        }
        if (!$directDownload) echo "</tr>";
        $outputData[] = $titleRow;
        $headersDone = true;
    }
    
    if (!$directDownload) echo "<tr>";
    $thisRow = array();
    foreach($a as $f=>$v) {
        $shouldShowField = !in_array($f, $fieldsToHide); 
        if ($shouldShowField) {
            if ($directDownload) {
                $thisRow[] = processArticleField($v);
            }else{
                echo "<td>".processArticleField($v)."</td>";
            }
        }
    }
    if (!$directDownload) echo "</tr>";
    $outputData[] = $thisRow;
}

if ($directDownload) {
    
    header("Content-Type: text/csv; charset=UTF-8");
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=desk_export_".date("H.i d-m-Y").".csv");
    // Disable caching
    header("Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"); // HTTP 1.1
    header("Pragma: no-cache"); // HTTP 1.0
    header("Expires: 0"); // Proxies
    
    $output = fopen("php://output", "w");
        foreach ($outputData as $row) {
            foreach($row as $i=>$a) {
                $row[$i] = mb_convert_encoding($row[$i], 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');//this makes the file 2x bigger, but at least resolves the accent issue
            }
            fputcsv($output, $row); // here you can change delimiter/enclosure
        }
        fclose($output);
}