We have a web app that stores and works with data with character encoding UTF-8.
When I open a CSV file exported from our system, I run into trouble as some programs will interpret the CSV as a different character encoding and funny symbols start to appear.
I’ve tried sending a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#UTF-8 but OpenOffice doesn’t seem to respect that.
Is there a way to force the file to be in UTF-8 encoding?
I could leave the file in UTF-8 and rely on our users to sort it out – however our users will not be particularly technical so I’m not sure this is wise.
Would a safer approach just be to convert the data to a basic character set before exporting?
We had a similar problem some time ago. The solution that worked for all applications was to send UTF-16LE encoded data with BOM.