Windows XP上的Python unicode问题

Question

Having the following django view code that generates a CSV response from a database view:

def _get_csv_stats(request, **filterargs):
   result = GlobalStats.objects.select_related().filter(**filterargs).values_list('user__username',
                                                                                  'user__first_name','user__last_name',
                                                                                  'center__name', 'action_name',
                                                                                  'action_date').annotate(num = Count('id')).order_by("action_date")
   response = HttpResponse(mimetype = 'text/csv')
   response.write( codecs.BOM_UTF8 )
   response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=statistcs.csv'
   writer = UnicodeWriter(response)
   for value in result:
       writer.writerow([unicode(v) for v in value])
   return response

Some of the columns contain utf8 text. When I download the file and open it using Linux or Mac OS XI can see the text properly. But downloading and opening the file using windows XP strange characters appear in the place of the non-ASCII text. Converting the file from csv to xls using Open Office on linux and opening the file on windows xp will result with a readable file (no strange characters).

I can't see what I'm missing here as I don't work with win XP. Has anyone experienced anything similar?

The UnicodeWriter class I'm using is descibed here at the bottom.

Answer 1

Whether the text is displayed properly depends on whether the font that is is being drawn in supports all Unicode characters. This is not a problem with your django.

Answer 2

First: I don't know django, so maybe this is far off.

Check whether your writer actually outputs UTF-8, if you write an UTF-8 BOM into the file. Unicode and UTF-8 are not the same. Also, afaikt, does Windows Notepad understand a UTF-8 BOM, so you getting "strange" characters can mean two things:

a) the rest of the file is not really UTF-8-encoded, try v.encode('utf-8') for that

b) the characters your trying to display are not supported by the font