Create CSV file containing UTF-8 characters in PHP and Javascript | Illegal Character \ufeff Problem

If you create or read a CSV file and the file contains some characters such as ü or ş, then you will find the characters are not displayed correctly in Excel. This is because the default coding of Excel is not UTF-8. To force Excel to use UTF-8, we need to add BOM (Byte Order Mark) in the beginning of the file.

<?php // When reading csv file using PHP // BOM as a string for comparison. $bom = "\xef\xbb\xbf"; // Read file from beginning. $fp = fopen($path, 'r'); // Progress file pointer and get first 3 characters to compare to the BOM string. if (fgets($fp, 4) !== $bom) { // BOM not found - rewind pointer to start of file. rewind($fp); } // Read CSV into an array. $lines = array(); while(!feof($fp) && ($line = fgetcsv($fp)) !== false) { $lines[] = $line; }

// When writting to csv file $fp = fopen($myFile, 'w'); fputs($fp, $bom =( chr(0xEF) . chr(0xBB) . chr(0xBF) )); fputcsv($fp, $otherdata);

// Javascript var csvFormattedDataTable = ''; csvFormattedDataTable += "\uFEFF"; csvFormattedDataTable += "other stuff"; var encodedUri = 'data:application/csv;charset=utf-8,' + encodeURIComponent(csvFormattedDataTable); $(buttonName).attr("href", encodedUri); $(buttonName).attr("download", 'table-data.csv'); $(buttonName).attr("target", '_blank');