Making UTF-8 CSV for Excel

22. 12. 2023

Sometimes you need to export a table to Excel and other spreadsheets. CSV file saved in UTF-8 seems to be the sufficiently universal format.

But there is a problem with non-ASCII characters in Excel. Excel default encoding depends on the system. The workaround is to put three magical bytes to the file beginning. They are called BOM (Byte order mark) and say to the editor that the file is encoded as UTF-8.

Code for the report of the assets of your company:

//headers
header('Pragma: public');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=export.csv;');
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary'); 

//open file pointer to standard output
$fp = fopen('php://output', 'w');

//add BOM to fix UTF-8 in Excel
fputs($fp, $bom =( chr(0xEF) . chr(0xBB) . chr(0xBF) ));
if ($fp)
{
  fputcsv($fp, array("Cars", "Planes", "Ships"), ";");
  fputcsv($fp, array("12", "2", "6"), ";");
  fputcsv($fp, array("23", "3", "5"), ";");
  fputcsv($fp, array("31", "5", "8"), ";");
}

fclose($fp);

Edit 2017-11-30: BOM does not work in older versions of Excel 2007. Try to update Excel in case of problems.

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