Question

I’m using excel 2010 professional plus to create an excel file.
Later on I’m trying to export it as a UTF-8 .csv file.
I do this by saving it as CSV (symbol separated…..sry I know not the exact wording there
but I don’t have the english version and I fear it is translated differently than 1:1).
There I click on tools->weboptions and select unicode (UTF-8) as encoding.
The example .csv is as follows:

ID;englishName;germanName
1;Austria;Österreich

So far so good, but if I open the file now with my php code:

 header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
 iconv_set_encoding("internal_encoding", "UTF-8");
 iconv_set_encoding("output_encoding", "UTF-8");
 setlocale(LC_ALL, 'de_DE.utf8');
 $fp=fopen($filePathName,'r');
 while (($dataRow= fgetcsv($fp,0,";",'"') )!==FALSE)
 {
     print_r($dataRow);
 }

• I get: �sterreich as a result on the screen (as that is the “error” I cut all other parts of the result).
• If I open the file with notedpad++ and look at the encoding I see “ANSI” instead of UTF-8.
• If I change the encoding in notepad++ to UTF8….the ö,ä,… are replaced by special chars, which I have to correct manually.

If I go another route and create a new UTF-8 file with notedpad++ and put in the same data as in the excel file I get shown “Österreich” on screen when I open it with the php file.

Now the question I have is, why does it not function with excel, thus am I doing something wrong here? Or am I overlooking something?

Edit:
As the program will in the end be installed on windows servers provided by customers,
a solution is needed where it is not necessary to install additional tools (php libraries,… are ok, but having to install a vm-ware or cygwin,… is not).
Also there won’t be a excel (or office) locally installed on the server as the
customer will be able to upload the .csv file via a file upload dialog (the dialog itself
is not part of the problem, as I know how to handle those and additionally the problem itself I stumbled over when I created an excel file and converted it to .csv on a testmachine where excel was locally installed).

Tnx

Answer 1

From PHP DOC

Locale setting is taken into account by this function. If LANG is e.g. en_US.UTF-8, files in one-byte encoding are read wrong by this function.

You can try

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
$fp = fopen("log.txt", "r");
echo "<pre>";
while ( ($dataRow = fgetcsv($fp, 1000, ";")) !== FALSE ) {
    $dataRow = array_map("utf8_encode", $dataRow);
    print_r($dataRow);
}

Output

Array
(
    [0] => ID
    [1] => englishName
    [2] => germanName
)
Array
(
    [0] => 1
    [1] => Austria
    [2] => Österreich
)