How to fix encoding while reading a CSV file?

Question

I'm reading a CSV file in php and so far as i have understood - these kind of files can have any encoding that was ever invented by hoomans omg and so on... i guess i have a MacRoman ANSI encoded CSV, i'm working on a Mac.

So far, so good (not good at all but thats another topic).. Now, while iterating through the lines, i have a value like:

Z�rich

Obviously, it should be "Zürich" - the "ü" is missing..

Now, i have tried almost anything.. mb_detect_encoding is saying "false" so, he doesn't understand what it is...

Then i have found a genius class by Sebastian Grignoli here -> Detect encoding and make everything UTF-8

Seems nice but... all i got is:

ZŸrich

not really the "ü" i have expected :D

Now i have found out, that a "utf8_encode" will work somehow, it generates:

Z\u009Frich

but.. what now? if i put this directly in the database, the final value is "Zrich", which means it is still not really UTF-8, or is the db just struggling with the escaped variant? When i make an mb_detect_encoding on that value, he says now "UTF-8".. nice.. but how can i go further? How can i get my "Zürich" the right way in UTF-8?

Answer 1

You can probably use iconv for the conversion. On my installation, the MacRoman encoding is called simply "MAC" :

$city = "Z\x9frich";
$city = iconv("MAC", "UTF-8", $city); 
echo $city; // Output: Zürich

Answer 2

Try to convert all the file first with iconv. And import later. Or iterate every line and convert with iconv.

You must know the original codification of your file.