Simon Willison’s Weblog

UnicodeDictWriter - write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.

Posted 20th August 2008 at 12:19 pm

2 comments

Thanks for posting this; Excel CSVs are my nemesis.

Adam Vandenberg - 20th August 2008 14:24 - #
Sometimes ago I explained how to do it in PHP:
```
$xls = "My file\tDelimite\tpar\tdes\ttabs\toi\r\nline 2\there you are\r\n";
$xls = chr(255).chr(254).mb_convert_encoding($xls, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
```
Then you just output the $xls with the right headers. You need the multibyte extension of PHP, UTF-8 is the original encoding and excel needs UTF-16.

Loïc d'Anterroches - 20th August 2008 19:46 - #