Django create CSV file that contains Unicode and can be opened directly with Excel

Question

I want to create a CSV file through Django that contains unicode data (greek characters) and I want it to be opened directly from MS Excel. Elsewhere I had read about the un

Answer 1

I've never been able to open a UTF-8-encoded (CSV) file in Excel. The only way I managed to make Excel import files properly was with UTF-16LE. YMMV.

EDIT

First

writer.writerow(codecs.BOM_UTF16_LE)

Then (as many times as required; str is the string to encode and write)

writer.writerow(str.decode('utf8').encode('utf_16_le'))

Answer 2

With Python's csv module, you can write a UTF-8 file that Excel will read correctly if you place a BOM at the beginning of the file.

with open('myfile.csv', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(u'\ufeff'.encode('utf8'))
    writer = csv.writer(f, delimiter=';', lineterminator='\n', quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL, dialect='excel')
    ...

The same should work with unicodecsv. I suppose you can write the BOM directly to the HttpResponse object, if not you can use StringIO to first write your file.

Edit:

Here's some sample code that writes a UTF-8 CSV file with non-ASCII characters. I'm taking Django out of the equation for simplicity. I can read that file in Excel.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import csv
import os
response = open(os.path.expanduser('~/utf8_test.csv'), 'wb')
response.write(u'\ufeff'.encode('utf8'))
writer = csv.writer(response, delimiter=';' , dialect='excel')
writer.writerow(['Second row', 'A', 'B', 'C', '"Testing"', u"ελληνικά".encode('utf8')])
response.close()