(Désolé, encore un article technique, en compensation - une photo de 'stinguette prise ce matin. J'expérimente aussi avec les 'catégories' dans ce blog - vous verrez que cet article est 'techno'; alors technophobes s'abstenir).
(Sorry, another technical post. But at least this time there's a photo of Little My, taken this morning. I'm also experimeting with 'labels' on this blog - you will notice that this one is 'Techno' - though not of the musical sort).(UPDATE 2008-09-05: This is by far the most read post on my blog. Leave a little comment for me if you find it useful, I like to hear your stories)
Hello, welcome to my blog if you came here searching in desperation for a solution to a stupid problem.
The problem is that Excel won't correctly interpret accents in a csv file with utf-8 encoding. So the following csv:
id;name
4;Hélène
Looks like this when opened in Excel:
id name
4 Hélène
Do you want to know the solution?
Do you really really want to know?
Are you prepared to abandon all coding niceties and foibles about doing things the right way?
The solution (the only one that I have found/worked after trawling through lots of google) is to save your data as html, but to give the file a .xls extension.
Don't ask me why, but despite being flummoxed by the csv, Excel is smart enough to eat the html, accents and all.
Here is an example of the same data - with the necessary charset declaration.
<html>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" charset="utf-8" />
<table>
<tr>
<th>id</th>
<th>name</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>Hélène</td>
</tr>
</table>
</html>
You can even do a bit of styling on the results:
<style>
table, td, th {border:solid black}
table {border-collapse:collapse;border-width:0 0.5pt 0.5pt 0}
td, th {border-width:0.5pt 0 0 0.5pt}
</style>
[Postscript for Anonymous (in comments below) - if using Notepad or equivalent, you have to Save As UTF-8, otherwise it won't work.]
