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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:04:57+00:00

I want to give the user the ability to import a csv file into

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I want to give the user the ability to import a csv file into my php/mysql system, but ran into some problems with encoding when the language is russian which excel only can store in UTF-16 tab-coded tab files.

Right now my database is in latin1, but I will change that to utf-8 as described in question “a-script-to-change-all-tables-and-fields-to-the-utf-8-bin-collation-in-mysql”

But how should I import the file? and store the strings?

Should I for example translate it to html_entitites?

I am using the fgetcsv command to get the data out of the csv file.
My code looks something like this right now.


file_put_contents($tmpfile, str_replace("\t", ";", file_get_contents($tmpfile)));
$filehandle = fopen($tmpfile,'r');
while (($data = fgetcsv($filehandle, 1000, ";")) !== FALSE) {
  $values[] = array(
    'id' => $data[0], 
    'type' => $data[1], 
    'text' => $data[4], 
    'desc' => $data[5], 
    'pdf' => $data[7]);
}

As note, if I store the xls file as csv in excel, i special chars are replaced by ‘_’, so the only way I can get the russian chars out of the file, is to store the file in excel as tabbed seperated file in UTF16 format.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Okay, the solution was to export the file from excel to UTF16 unicode text and add the ‘;’ instaid of ‘\t’ and convert from utf16 to utf8.

    file_put_contents($tmpfile, str_replace("\t", ";",  iconv('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', file_get_contents($tmpfile))));

    The table in mysql has to be changed from latin1 to utf8

    ALTER TABLE  `translation` 
CHANGE  `text`  `text` VARCHAR( 100 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL ,
CHANGE  `desc`  `desc` VARCHAR( 255 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL

    And then the file could be imported as before.

    When I want to export the data from the database to a excel file, the csv-version is not an option. It has to be done in excel's html mode. Where data is corrected by eg. urlencode() or htmlentities()

    Here some example code.

    
<?php
header('Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="export.xls"');
print ('<html xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
<div id="Classeur1_16681" align=center x:publishsource="Excel">
<table x:str border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=100% style="border-collapse: collapse">');
for($i = 0 ; $i < count($lines) ; $i++) {
    print ('<tr><td>');
  print implode("</td><td>",$lines[$i]);
    print ('</td></tr>');
}
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>
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