How Can I Ensure My PHP-Generated UTF-8 CSV Files Are Compatible with Microsoft Excel?

Ensuring Excel Compatibility for UTF-8 CSV Outputs in PHP

While using UTF-8 for CSV export is essential for proper character encoding, users often encounter issues when importing such files into Microsoft Excel. To address this issue, it's crucial to understand Excel's handling of UTF-8 CSV files.

The solution lies in including the Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the beginning of the CSV file. The BOM is a three-byte sequence that identifies the UTF-8 character encoding. By incorporating it, Excel can correctly interpret the file as UTF-8, enabling proper display and interpretation of special characters.

To incorporate the BOM, modify your PHP code as follows:

header('Content-type: text/csv; charset=UTF-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=CHS.csv');
echo "\xEF\xBB\xBF"; // UTF-8 BOM

The BOM can be added as a literal string, as shown above, or dynamically generated using the pack() function:

$bom = pack("CCC", 0xef, 0xbb, 0xbf);
echo $bom;

By adding the BOM to your CSV output, you ensure that Excel correctly interprets the file's character encoding and displays special characters properly. This solution has been reported to work in Excel 2007 for Windows, and may also apply to Excel for Mac OS.

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