Question

I’m importing a CSV using the fgetcsv() function, which is working all good.

However, when I take a look at the data in the database, I see black diamonds with question marks. This isn’t too much of an issue when echoing the data back out again, as they don’t appear, but when I want to use one of the CSV fields as a MySQL date, it isn’t recognised as a date and is stored as 0000-00-00.

e.g.

I think this issue is something to do with encoding of the CSV? Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks!

Edit: if it helps here is my import script, and the encode type is ASCII according to mb_detect_encoding

<?php
include 'config.php';
include 'opendb.php';
ini_set("auto_detect_line_endings", true);

$row = 0;
$tmpName = $_FILES['csv']['tmp_name'];

if (($handle = fopen($tmpName, "r")) !== FALSE) {
    $num = count($data);

     while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE)
     {
        $noQuotes = str_replace("\"", '', $data);
        $originalDate = $noQuotes[1];

        //$delivery_date = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($originalDate));

        $parts = explode('/', $originalDate);
        $delivery_date = $parts[2] . '-' . $parts[1] . '-' . $parts[0];

        $row++;

        $import="INSERT into dispatch (delivery_note_number, delivery_date, dispatch_date, customer_delivery_date, delivery_line, produce, variety, quantity, pallets, count, depot, customer, grower, haulier, status) 
        values ('$noQuotes[0]', '$delivery_date', '$noQuotes[2]', '$noQuotes[3]', '$noQuotes[4]', '$noQuotes[5]', '$noQuotes[6]', '$noQuotes[7]', '$noQuotes[8]', '$noQuotes[9]', '$noQuotes[10]', '$noQuotes[11]', '$noQuotes[12]', '$noQuotes[13]', '$noQuotes[14]')";

        echo $import; 
        mysql_query($import) or die(mysql_error());
     }

        //header("location:list_dispatch.php?st=recordsadded");


    fclose($handle);
}

?>

Answer 1

Someone found a solution on a another forum:

Those are NUL characters (ASCII code 0x00), replace them like this:

$string = str_replace(chr(0), ”, $string);