文件中的字符编码错误

Question

I have a input where the user can (and has and will always) paste data in from MSword; in particular characters like © ® ™

When I add the value to the database system using html_entity_decode($foo, ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8');

When I read from the database system it renders on the screen fine, but when I write the data to a file (using fputscsv ) and attach that to an email the resulting csv file (opened in Excel) it comes out like Copyright© .

Any idea on how to get it in the right format for the file?

Answer 1

Try writing byte order mark to the file before writing CSV string.

$byte_order_mark = "\xEF\xBB\xBF";
$contents = $byte_order_mark . $csv_string;
file_put_contents( $path_to_csv_file );

Answer 2

Solution found; it turned out to be a character encoding problem (I'm blaming Microsoft, as it is fine when you open the file in Notepad++).

When adding the data to the file convert the character encoding of the data using iconv .
Example;

foreach ($data_row as $k => $cell) {
    $data_row[$k] = iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $cell);
}