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

Question

I\'ve got this very simple thing that just outputs some stuff in CSV format, but it\'s got to be UTF-8. I open this file in TextEdit or TextMate or Dreamweaver and it displa

Answer 1

**This is 100% works fine in excel for both Windows7,8,10 and also All Mac OS.**
//Fix issues in excel that are not displaying characters containing diacritics, cyrillic letters, Greek letter and currency symbols.

function generateCSVFile($filename, $headings, $data) {

    //Use tab as field separator
    $newTab  = "\t";
    $newLine  = "\n";

    $fputcsv  =  count($headings) ? '"'. implode('"'.$newTab.'"', $headings).'"'.$newLine : '';

    // Loop over the * to export
    if (! empty($data)) {
      foreach($data as $item) {
        $fputcsv .= '"'. implode('"'.$newTab.'"', $item).'"'.$newLine;
      }
    }

    //Convert CSV to UTF-16
    $encoded_csv = mb_convert_encoding($fputcsv, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');

    // Output CSV-specific headers
    header('Set-Cookie: fileDownload=true; path=/'); //This cookie is needed in order to trigger the success window.
    header("Pragma: public");
    header("Expires: 0");
    header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
    header("Cache-Control: private",false);
    header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename.csv\";" );
    header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
    header('Content-Length: '. strlen($encoded_csv));
    echo chr(255) . chr(254) . $encoded_csv; //php array convert to csv/excel
    exit;
}