Microsoft Excel mangles Diacritics in .csv files?

Question

I am programmatically exporting data (using PHP 5.2) into a .csv test file.
Example data: Numéro 1 (note the accented e). The data is utf-8 (

Answer 1

I've also noticed that the question was "answered" some time ago but I don't understand the stories that say you can't open a utf8-encoded csv file successfully in Excel without using the text wizard.

My reproducible experience: Type Old MacDonald had a farm,ÈÌÉÍØ into Notepad, hit Enter, then Save As (using the UTF-8 option).

Using Python to show what's actually in there:

>>> open('oldmac.csv', 'rb').read()
'\xef\xbb\xbfOld MacDonald had a farm,\xc3\x88\xc3\x8c\xc3\x89\xc3\x8d\xc3\x98\r\n'
>>> ^Z

Good. Notepad has put a BOM at the front.

Now go into Windows Explorer, double click on the file name, or right click and use "Open with ...", and up pops Excel (2003) with display as expected.