Convert HTML Table to Tab Delimited .TXT file

Howdy All, I've PHP / Apache / MySQL running on a Linux machine where a GUI allows an administrator to track changes made to computers on our intranet. I've been asked to add an 'history' button so that all changes made to one or more computers can be put into a table, displayed on client machines (windows), then imported into an excel spread sheet. So far so good. I'm querying the dB, retrieving the requested records, then displaying in a new window in a table with border set to '0'. The expectation is that the admin on a client machine will then copy the table to a text file, then import into excel. The problem is with the field separator. I tried concatenating a '\t' to each field but this didn't behave as expected. Eventually, I concated a '|' (bar) character, and this imported with the correct formatting. However, now there is this foreign character at the end of each cell in the spread sheet. My question is whether there might be a more direct way to get the dB data into excel on the client PC (can't imagine how), or if not, how I might create a 'tab delimited' file from the HTML table and avoid introducing a foreign character as a field separator. Thanks for reading this long post. dave