Question

My export script:

if($_POST){
    $file = 'FKDB_XLS';
    $filename = $file."_".date("Y-m-d_H-i",time()); 
    header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=utf-8"); // dunno if the charset does anything for this application type..
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
    echo stripslashes($_SESSION['item']); unset($_SESSION['item']);
    exit;
}

Basicly, it just turns HTML ($_SESSION['item'] as <table>{rows}</table>) into *.xls and allows Excel to draw tables from that data, as most of you know, probably.

The problem is, when opened in Excel, everything’s OK, except… all the values are written incorrectly, with all the Ä, ņÅ and so on instead of ‘Ā’ or so, again.

What should I do to prevent that?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you’re writing HTML markup for import into excel, then you need to ensure that you’re setting the appropriate meta tags in the HTML header. specifying charset in the Content type will have absolutely no effect at all. If you’re simply writing a table, then wrap it in HTML/HEAD/BODY, etc so that you can set the HEAD meta tags.

I still don’t understand why people write HTML and give the file an xls extension when it’s so easy to create a real Excel file!