Write Utf-8 Characters to File with Fputcsv in PHP

write utf-8 characters to file with fputcsv in php

Try this:

$df = fopen($filepath, 'w');
fprintf($df, chr(0xEF).chr(0xBB).chr(0xBF));
fputcsv($df, array($coupon->code, $discount->label));

the line fprintf($df, chr(0xEF).chr(0xBB).chr(0xBF)); writes file header for correct encoding.

PHP fputcsv encoding

Default encoding for an excel file is machine specific ANSI, mainly windows1252. But since you are creating that file and maybe inserting UTF-8 characters, that file is not going to be handled ok.

You could use iconv() when creating the file. Eg:

function encodeCSV(&$value, $key){
    $value = iconv('UTF-8', 'Windows-1252', $value);
}
array_walk($values, 'encodeCSV');

How can I output a UTF-8 CSV in PHP that Excel will read properly?

To quote a Microsoft support engineer,

Excel for Mac does not currently support UTF-8

Update, 2017: This is true of all versions of Microsoft Excel for Mac before Office 2016. Newer versions (from Office 365) do now support UTF-8.

In order to output UTF-8 content that Excel both on Windows and OS X will be able to successfully read, you will need to do two things:

1. Make sure that you convert your UTF-8 CSV text to UTF-16LE

   mb_convert_encoding($csv, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
   

2. Make sure that you add the UTF-16LE byte order mark to the start of the file

   chr(255) . chr(254)
   

The next problem that appears only with Excel on OS X (but not Windows) will be when viewing a CSV file with comma separated values, Excel will render rows only with one row and all of the text along with the commas in the first row.

The way to avoid this is to use tabs as your separated value.

I used this function from the PHP comments (using tabs "\t" instead of commas) and it worked perfectly on OS X and Windows Excel.

Note that to fix an issue with an empty column as the end of a row, that I did have to change the line of code that says:

    $field_cnt = count($fields);

to

    $field_cnt = count($fields)-1;

As some of the other comments on this page say, other spreadsheet apps like OpenOffice Calc, Apple's own Numbers and Google Doc's Spreadsheet have no issues with UTF-8 files with commas.

See the table in this question for what works and doesn't work for Unicode CSV files in Excel

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As a side note, I might add that if you are using Composer, you should have a look at adding League\Csv to your requires. League\Csv has a really nice API for building CSV files.

To use League\Csv with this method of creating CSV files, check out this example

Adding BOM to CSV file using fputcsv

Thanks to Mark Baker for this answer:

I needed to use fwrite() to add the BOM, not fputcsv().

The working version looks like this:

if(file_exists($file)) {
    $fp = fopen($file, 'a');
    if($fp && 
        fputcsv($fp, $submittedForm) && 
        fclose($fp)) {
        return true;
    } 
} else {
    $fp = fopen($file, 'w');
    fwrite($fp, $BOM); // NEW LINE
    if($fp &&    
        fputcsv($fp, $fields) &&
        fputcsv($fp, $submittedForm) &&
        fclose($fp)) {     
        return true;
    } 
}

Thanks, Mark!

PHP fputcsv does not display Chinese Character Correctly

In your case the problem was not in PHP. When you open a csv file in Excel it shows you a window, where you can setup CSV importing options like delimiter and encoding. You should choose UTF-8 encoding to view those Chinese characters.

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