UTF8 Encoding with vCards in Windows

encoding utf-8 vcf-vcard
hphoeksma picture hphoeksma · Dec 23, 2011 · Viewed 34k times · Source

I have implemented a vCard on a website. Problem is though that special characters are not parsed correctly on windows.

I can get it to work fine for Mac, but as soon as I open a vcf in Windows (Windows Contacts) it gets messed up. When I open the vcf in Notepad it shows the characters normally.

I tried all vcf versions I could find (2.1,3.0,4.0). I used charset-utf-8 in my content-type header (text/x-vcard; charset: utf-8). I used N;CHARSET=utf-8: (and for the other tags).

All to no avail.

Does anyone has a solution for this? Thanks for sharing your insight.

Headers used:

header("Content-type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$this->filename.".vcf");
header("Pragma: public");

Answer

user808667 picture user808667 · Mar 17, 2017

To make Outlook import UTF-8 vCards you have to open Outlook options, go to Advanced > International Options and then select UTF-8 for outgoing emails and outgoing vCards... And voila - import works!

Isn't it obvious, that one has to set export options to setup import...? Thanks Microsoft :P

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