PHP fputcsv with UTF-8 Problem

Question

I'm trying to allow my clients view some of the MySQL data in Excel. I have used PHP's fputcsv() function, like:

public function generate() {
   setlocale(LC_ALL, 'ko_KR.UTF8');

   $this->filename = date("YmdHis");
   $create = $this->directory."Report".$this->filename.".csv";

   $f = fopen("$create","w") or die("can't open file");
   fwrite($f, "\xEF\xBB\xBF");

   $i = 1;
   $length = count($this->inputarray[0]);

   fwrite($f, $this->headers."\n");

   // print column titles
   foreach($this->inputarray[0] as $key=>$value) {
    $delimiter = ($i == $length) ? "\n\n" : ",";
    fwrite($f, $key.$delimiter);
    $i++;
   }

   // print actual rows
   foreach($this->inputarray as $row) {
    fputcsv($f, $row);
   }
   fclose($f);
  } 

My clients are Korean, and a good chunk of the MySQL database contains values in utf8_unicode_ci. By using the above function, I successfully generated a CSV file with correctly encoded data that opens fine in Excel on my machine (Win7 in English), but when I opened the file in Excel on the client computer (Win7 in Korean), the characters were broken again. I tried taking the header (\xEF\xBB\xBF) out, and commenting out the setlocale, to no avail.

Can you help me figure this out?

Answer 1

If, as you say, your CSV file has "correctly encoded data" - i.e. that it contains a valid UTF-8 byte stream, and assuming that the byte stream of the file on your client's site is the same (e.g. has not been corrupted in transit by a file transfer problem) then it sounds like the issue Excel on the client's machine not correctly interpreting the UTF-8. This might be because it's not supported or that some option needs to be selected when importing to indicate the encoding. As such, you might try producing your file in a different encoding (using mb_convert_encoding or iconv).

If you get your client to export a CSV containing Korean characters then you'll be able to take a look at that file and determine the encoding that is being produced. You should then try using that encoding.