I have been stuck for days on exporting UTF-8 CSV with chinese characters that shows garbled text on Windows Excel. I am using PHP and have already added the BOM byte mark and tried encoding but no luck at all.
They open fine on Notepad++, Google Spreadsheet and even on Mac Numbers. But not on Excel which is a requirement by the client. When opening with Notepad++ the encoding is shown as UTF-8. If I change it to UTF-8 manually and save, the file opens fine on Excel.
It seems as though the BOM byte mark doesn't get saved in the output as Notepad++ always detect it as UTF-8 without BOM.
Also, the CSV is not saved on server. Data is retrieved from DB and then exported directly out.
Here are my codes:
// Setup headersheader('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');header('Content-Description: File Transfer');header("Content-type: text/csv");header("Content-disposition: filename=".$filename.".csv");header("Pragma: no-cache");// First Method$fp = fopen('php://output', 'w');// Add BOM to fix UTF-8 in Excel, but doesn't workfputs($fp, chr(0xEF) . chr(0xBB) . chr(0xBF) );if ($fp) { fputcsv($fp, array("Header"), ","); fputcsv($fp, array($string_with_chinese_chars), ",");}fclose($fp);exit();// Second Method$csv = "";$sep = ",";$newline = "\n"; // Also tried with PHP_EOL$csv .= "Header";$csv .= $newline;$csv .= $string_with_chinese_chars;$csv .= $newline;// Tried all the below ways but doesn't work.// Method 2.1print chr(255) . chr(254) . mb_convert_encoding($csv, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');// Method 2.2print chr(239) . chr(187) . chr(191) . $csv;// Method 2.3print chr(0xEF).chr(0xBB).chr(0xBF);print $newline;print $csv;