Is it possible to force Excel recognize UTF-8 CSV files automatically?

Question

I\'m developing a part of an application that\'s responsible for exporting some data into CSV files. The application always uses UTF-8 because of its multilingual nature at

Answer 1

Had the same problems with PHP-generated CSV files. Excel ignored the BOM when the Separator was defined via "sep=,\n" at the beginning of the content (but of course after the BOM).

So adding a BOM ("\xEF\xBB\xBF") at the beginning of the content and setting the semicolon as separator via fputcsv($fh, $data_array, ";"); does the trick.