Exporting tweets text with multiple lines into csv [duplicate] - r
I need to generate a file for Excel, some of the values in this file contain multiple lines.
there's also non-English text in there, so the file has to be Unicode.
The file I'm generating now looks like this: (in UTF8, with non English text mixed in and with a lot of lines)
Header1,Header2,Header3
Value1,Value2,"Value3 Line1
Value3 Line2"
Note the multi-line value is enclosed in double quotes, with a normal everyday newline in it.
According to what I found on the web this supposed to work, but it doesn't, at least not win Excel 2007 and UTF8 files, Excel treats the 3rd line as the second row of data not as the second line of the first data row.
This has to run on my customer's machines and I have no control over their version of Excel, so I need a solution that will work with Excel 2000 and later.
Thanks
EDIT: I "solved" my problem by having two CSV options, one for Excel (Unicode, tab separated, no newlines in fields) and one for the rest of the world (UTF8, standard CSV).
Not what I was looking for but at least it works (so far)
You should have space characters at the start of fields ONLY where the space characters are part of the data. Excel will not strip off leading spaces. You will get unwanted spaces in your headings and data fields. Worse, the " that should be "protecting" that line-break in the third column will be ignored because it is not at the start of the field.
If you have non-ASCII characters (encoded in UTF-8) in the file, you should have a UTF-8 BOM (3 bytes, hex EF BB BF) at the start of the file. Otherwise Excel will interpret the data according to your locale's default encoding (e.g. cp1252) instead of utf-8, and your non-ASCII characters will be trashed.
Following comments apply to Excel 2003, 2007 and 2013; not tested on Excel 2000
If you open the file by double-clicking on its name in Windows Explorer, everything works OK.
If you open it from within Excel, the results vary:
You have only ASCII characters in the file (and no BOM): works.
You have non-ASCII characters (encoded in UTF-8) in the file, with a UTF-8 BOM at the start: it recognises that your data is encoded in UTF-8 but it ignores the csv extension and drops you into the Text Import not-a-Wizard, unfortunately with the result that you get the line-break problem.
Options include:
Train the users not to open the files from within Excel :-(
Consider writing an XLS file directly ... there are packages/libraries available for doing that in Python/Perl/PHP/.NET/etc
After lots of tweaking, here's a configuration that works generating files on Linux, reading on Windows+Excel, though the embedded newline format is not according to the standard:
Newlines within a field need to be \n (and obviously quoted in double quotes)
End of record: \r\n
Make sure that you don't start a field with equals, otherwise it gets treated as a formula and truncated
In Perl, I used Text::CSV to do this as follows:
use Text::CSV;
open my $FO, ">:encoding(utf8)", $filename or die "Cannot create $filename: $!";
my $csv = Text::CSV->new({ binary => 1, eol => "\r\n" });
#for each row...:
$csv -> print ($FO, \#row);
Recently I had similar problem, I solved it by importing a HTML file, the baseline example would be like this:
<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
<head>
<style>
<!--
br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>first line<br/>second line</td>
<td style="white-space:normal">first line<br/>second line</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
I know, it is not a CSV, and might work differently for various versions of Excel, but I think it is worth a try.
I hope this helps ;-)
In Excel 365 while importing the file:
Data -> From Text/CSV:
-> Select File > Transform Data:
In the Power Query Editor, right hand side at "Query Settings", under APPLIED STEPS, on "Source" row, click the "Settings icon"
-> In the line break dropdown select Ignore line breaks inside quotes.
Then press OK -> File -> Close & Load
It is worth noting that when a .CSV file has fields wrapped in double quotes which contain line breaks, Excel will not import the .CSV file properly if the .CSV file is written in UTF-8 format. Excel treats the line break as if it were CR/LF and begins a new line. The spreadsheet is garbled. That seems to be true even if semi-colons are used as field delimiters (instead of commas).
The problem can be resolved by using Windows Notepad to edit the .CSV file, using File > Save As... to save the file, and before saving the file, changing the file encoding from UTF-8 to ANSI. Once the file is saved in ANSI format, then I find that Microsoft Excel 2013 running on Windows 7 Professional will import the file properly.
Newline inside a value seems to work if you use semicolon as separator, instead of comma or tab, and use quotes.
This works for me in both Excel 2010 and Excel 2000. However, surprisingly, it works only when you open the file as a new spreadsheet, not when you import it into an existing spreadsheet using the data import feature.
On a PC, ASCII character #10 is what you want to place a newline within a value.
Once you get it into Excel, however, you need to make sure word wrap is turned on for the multi-line cells or the newline will appear as a square box.
This will not work if you try to import the file into EXCEL.
Associate the file extension csv with EXCEL.EXE so you will be able to invoke EXCEL by double-clicking the csv file.
Here I place some text followed by the NewLine Char followed by some more text AND enclosing the whole string with double quotes.
Do not use a CR since EXCEL will place part of the string in the next cell.
""text" + NL + "text""
When you invoke EXCEL, you will see this. You may have to auto size the height to see it all. Where the line breaks will depend on the width of the cell.
2
DATE
Here's the code in Basic
CHR$(34,"2", 10,"DATE", 34)
I found this and it has worked for me
$delimiter = ',';
$enc1 = '"';
$enc2 = '""';
Then where you need to have stuff enclosed
$myfile = ('/path/to/myfile.csv');
//erase any previous contents
$fp = fopen($myfile, 'w+');
fwrite($fp, $enc1 . 'Column Heading 1' . $enc1 . $delimiter );
//append to new file
$fp2 = fopen($myfile, 'a');
fwrite($fp2, $enc1 . 'Column Heading 2' . $enc1 . $delimiter );
.....
fwrite($fp2, $enc1 . 'Last Column Heading' . $enc1 . $delimiter. PHP_EOL );
Then when you need to write something out - like HTML that includes the " you can do this
fwrite($fp2, $enc2 . $myhtmlstring . $enc2 . $delimiter);
New lines end with . PHP_EOL
The end of the script prints out a link so that the user can download the file.
echo 'Click here to download file';
Test this:
It fully works for me:
Put the following lines in a xxxx.csv file
hola_x,="este es mi text1"&CHAR(10)&"I sigo escribiendo",hola_a
hola_y,="este es mi text2"&CHAR(10)&"I sigo escribiendo",hola_b
hola_z,="este es mi text3"&CHAR(10)&"I sigo escribiendo",hola_c
Open with excel.
in some cases will open directly otherwise will need to use column to data conversion.
expand the column width and hit the wrap text button. or format cells and activate wrap text.
and thanks for the other suggestions, but they did not work for me. I am in a pure windows env, and did not want to play with unicode or other funny thing.
This way you putting a formula from csv to excel. It may be many uses for this method of work.
(note the = before the quotes)
pd:In your suggestions please put some samples of the data not only the code.
UTF files that contain a BOM will cause Excel to treat new lines literally even in that field is surrounded by quotes. (Tested Excel 2008 Mac)
The solution is to make any new lines a carriage return (CHR 13) rather than a line feed.
putting "\r" at the end of each row actually had the effect of line breaks in excel, but in the .csv it vanished and left an ugly mess where each row was squashed against the next with no space and no line-breaks
For File Open only, the syntax is
,"one\n
two",...
The critical thing is that there is no space after the first ",". Normally spaces are fine, and trimmed if the string is not quoted. But otherwise nasty. Took me a while to figure that out.
It does not seem to matter if the line is ended \n or \c\n.
Make sure you expand the formula bar so you can actually see the text in the cell (got me after a long day...)
Now of course, File Open will not support UTF-8 Properly (unless one uses tricks).
Excel > Data > Get External Data > From Text
Can be set into UTF-8 mode (it is way down the list of fonts). However, in that case the new lines do not seem to work and I know no way to fix that.
(One might thing that after 30 years MS would get this stuff right.)
The way we do it (we use VB.Net) is to enclose the text with new lines in Chr(34) which is the char representing the double quotes and replace all CR-LF characters for LF.
Normally a new line is "\r\n". In my CSV, I replaced "\r" with empty value.
Here is code in Javascript:
cellValue = cellValue.replace(/\r/g, "")
When I open the CSV in MS Excel, it worked well. If a value has multiple lines, it will stay within 1 single cell in the Excel sheet.
you can do the next "\"Value3 Line1 Value3 Line2\"". It works for me generating a csv file in java
Here is an interesting approach using JavaScript ...
String.prototype.csv = String.prototype.split.partial(/,\s*/);
var results = ("Mugan, Jin, Fuu").csv();
console.log(results[0]=="Mugan" &&
results[1]=="Jin" &&
results[2]=="Fuu",
"The text values were split properly");
Printing a HTML newline <br/> into the content and opening in excel will work fine on any excel
You could use keyboard shortcut ALT+Enter.
Select the cell you wish to edit
enter edit mode either by double clicking it or pressing F2
3.Press Alt+enter. This will create a new line in cell
Related
R exports a blank last line in text file by "write.table()" [duplicate]
In R: Is it possible to avoid having a blank line at the end of a text file generated by writeLines? If not, is there any other way of generating a text file from within R without having a blank line at the end?
There is no blank line. R (correctly) ends each line with '\n' (or '\r\n' on Windows). In other words, the file consists of lines, and each line ends with a line break. Unfortunately, there are many tools (especially on Windows) which treat such files incorrectly and display an extra line at the end. However, that’s a fault with these tools, not with R. Consequently, this shouldn’t be fixed in the R code. As a hack to appease buggy tools, the only recourse is to set the sep argument of writeLines to the empty string, '', and insert the line breaks between lines manually (using paste).
I had exactly the same concern (different grid, though) and even your comment of the accept answer (by Konrad) did not work for me.
I found the answer here, and here is the full code:
fileConn = file("mytext.txt")
writeLines(c("line1", "line2", "line3"), sep="\n", fileConn)
#now connect to UNIX server and upload your file
library(ssh)
session=ssh_connect("user#server.com")
scp_upload(session, files="mytext.txt")
#Here is the trick, convert all the Windows extra chars to unix
ssh_exec_wait(session, command="dos2unix mytext.txt")
#Then start your Grid job
ssh_exec_wait(session, command="sbatch mytext.txt")
ssh_disconnect(session)
Wrong encoding of quotation marks in write_csv() [duplicate]
I'm developing a part of an application that's responsible for exporting some data into CSV files. The application always uses UTF-8 because of its multilingual nature at all levels. But opening such CSV files (containing e.g. diacritics, cyrillic letters, Greek letters) in Excel does not achieve the expected results showing something like Г„/Г¤, Г–/Г¶. And I don't know how to force Excel understand that the open CSV file is encoded in UTF-8. I also tried specifying UTF-8 BOM EF BB BF, but Excel ignores that. Is there any workaround? P.S. Which tools may potentially behave like Excel does? UPDATE I have to say that I've confused the community with the formulation of the question. When I was asking this question, I asked for a way of opening a UTF-8 CSV file in Excel without any problems for a user, in a fluent and transparent way. However, I used a wrong formulation asking for doing it automatically. That is very confusing and it clashes with VBA macro automation. There are two answers for this questions that I appreciate the most: the very first answer by Alex https://stackoverflow.com/a/6002338/166589, and I've accepted this answer; and the second one by Mark https://stackoverflow.com/a/6488070/166589 that have appeared a little later. From the usability point of view, Excel seemed to have lack of a good user-friendly UTF-8 CSV support, so I consider both answers are correct, and I have accepted Alex's answer first because it really stated that Excel was not able to do that transparently. That is what I confused with automatically here. Mark's answer promotes a more complicated way for more advanced users to achieve the expected result. Both answers are great, but Alex's one fits my not clearly specified question a little better. UPDATE 2 Five months later after the last edit, I've noticed that Alex's answer has disappeared for some reason. I really hope it wasn't a technical issue and I hope there is no more discussion on which answer is greater now. So I'm accepting Mark's answer as the best one.
Alex is correct, but as you have to export to csv, you can give the users this advice when opening the csv files: Save the exported file as a csv Open Excel Import the data using Data-->Import External Data --> Import Data Select the file type of "csv" and browse to your file In the import wizard change the File_Origin to "65001 UTF" (or choose correct language character identifier) Change the Delimiter to comma Select where to import to and Finish This way the special characters should show correctly.
The UTF-8 Byte-order mark will clue Excel 2007+ in to the fact that you're using UTF-8. (See this SO post). In case anybody is having the same issues I was, .NET's UTF8 encoding class does not output a byte-order marker in a GetBytes() call. You need to use streams (or use a workaround) to get the BOM to output.
The bug with ignored BOM seems to be fixed for Excel 2013. I had same problem with Cyrillic letters, but adding BOM character \uFEFF did help.
It is incredible that there are so many answers but none answers the question:
"When I was asking this question, I asked for a way of opening a UTF-8
CSV file in Excel without any problems for a user,..."
The answer marked as the accepted answer with 200+ up-votes is useless for me because I don't want to give my users a manual how to configure Excel.
Apart from that: this manual will apply to one Excel version but other Excel versions have different menus and configuration dialogs. You would need a manual for each Excel version.
So the question is how to make Excel show UTF8 data with a simple double click?
Well at least in Excel 2007 this is not possible if you use CSV files because the UTF8 BOM is ignored and you will see only garbage. This is already part of the question of Lyubomyr Shaydariv:
"I also tried specifying UTF-8 BOM EF BB BF, but Excel ignores that."
I make the same experience: Writing russian or greek data into a UTF8 CSV file with BOM results in garbage in Excel:
Content of UTF8 CSV file:
Colum1;Column2
Val1;Val2
Авиабилет;Tλληνικ
Result in Excel 2007:
A solution is to not use CSV at all. This format is implemented so stupidly by Microsoft that it depends on the region settings in control panel if comma or semicolon is used as separator. So the same CSV file may open correctly on one computer but on anther computer not. "CSV" means "Comma Separated Values" but for example on a german Windows by default semicolon must be used as separator while comma does not work. (Here it should be named SSV = Semicolon Separated Values) CSV files cannot be interchanged between different language versions of Windows. This is an additional problem to the UTF-8 problem.
Excel exists since decades. It is a shame that Microsoft was not able to implement such a basic thing as CSV import in all these years.
However, if you put the same values into a HTML file and save that file as UTF8 file with BOM with the file extension XLS you will get the correct result.
Content of UTF8 XLS file:
<table>
<tr><td>Colum1</td><td>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Авиабилет</td><td>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
Result in Excel 2007:
You can even use colors in HTML which Excel will show correctly.
<style>
.Head { background-color:gray; color:white; }
.Red { color:red; }
</style>
<table border=1>
<tr><td class=Head>Colum1</td><td class=Head>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td class=Red>Авиабилет</td><td class=Red>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
Result in Excel 2007:
In this case only the table itself has a black border and lines. If you want ALL cells to display gridlines this is also possible in HTML:
<html xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/plain; charset=UTF-8"/>
<xml>
<x:ExcelWorkbook>
<x:ExcelWorksheets>
<x:ExcelWorksheet>
<x:Name>MySuperSheet</x:Name>
<x:WorksheetOptions>
<x:DisplayGridlines/>
</x:WorksheetOptions>
</x:ExcelWorksheet>
</x:ExcelWorksheets>
</x:ExcelWorkbook>
</xml>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr><td>Colum1</td><td>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Авиабилет</td><td>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
This code even allows to specify the name of the worksheet (here "MySuperSheet")
Result in Excel 2007:
We have used this workaround: Convert CSV to UTF-16 LE Insert BOM at beginning of file Use tab as field separator
Had the same problems with PHP-generated CSV files.
Excel ignored the BOM when the Separator was defined via "sep=,\n" at the beginning of the content (but of course after the BOM).
So adding a BOM ("\xEF\xBB\xBF") at the beginning of the content and setting the semicolon as separator via fputcsv($fh, $data_array, ";"); does the trick.
You can convert .csv file to UTF-8 with BOM via Notepad++: Open the file in Notepad++. Go to menu Encoding→Convert to UTF-8-BOM. Go to menu File→Save. Close Notepad++. Open the file in Excel . Worked in Microsoft Excel 2013 (15.0.5093.1000) MSO (15.0.5101.1000) 64-bit from Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 on Windows 8.1 with locale for non-Unicode programs set to "German (Germany)".
Old question but heck, the simplest solution is: Open CSV in Notepad Save As -> select the right encoding Open the new file
I have had the same issue in the past (how to produce files that Excel can read, and other tools can also read). I was using TSV rather than CSV, but the same problem with encodings came up. I failed to find any way to get Excel to recognize UTF-8 automatically, and I was not willing/able to inflict on the consumers of the files complicated instructions how to open them. So I encoded them as UTF-16le (with a BOM) instead of UTF-8. Twice the size, but Excel can recognize the encoding. And they compress well, so the size rarely (but sadly not never) matters.
As I posted on http://thinkinginsoftware.blogspot.com/2017/12/correctly-generate-csv-that-excel-can.html: Tell the software developer in charge of generating the CSV to correct it. As a quick workaround you can use gsed to insert the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of the string: gsed -i '1s/^\(\xef\xbb\xbf\)\?/\xef\xbb\xbf/' file.csv This command inserts the UTF-4 BOM if not present. Therefore it is an idempotent command. Now you should be able to double click the file and open it in Excel.
In php you just prepend $bom to your $csv_string: $bom = sprintf( "%c%c%c", 239, 187, 191); // EF BB BF file_put_contents( $file_name, $bom . $csv_string ); Tested with MS Excel 2016, php 7.2.4
Simple vba macro for opening utf-8 text and csv files
Sub OpenTextFile()
filetoopen = Application.GetOpenFilename("Text Files (*.txt;*.csv), *.txt;*.csv")
If filetoopen = Null Or filetoopen = Empty Then Exit Sub
Workbooks.OpenText Filename:=filetoopen, _
Origin:=65001, DataType:=xlDelimited, Comma:=True
End Sub
Origin:=65001 is UTF-8.
Comma:True for .csv files distributed in colums
Save it in Personal.xlsb to have it always available.
Personalise excel toolbar adding a macro call button and open files from there.
You can add more formating to the macro, like column autofit , alignment,etc.
Just for help users interested on opening the file on Excel that achieve this thread like me. I have used the wizard below and it worked fine for me, importing an UTF-8 file. Not transparent, but useful if you already have the file. Open Microsoft Excel 2007. Click on the Data menu bar option. Click on the From Text icon. Navigate to the location of the file that you want to import. Click on the filename and then click on the Import button. The Text Import Wizard - Step 1 or 3 window will now appear on the screen. Choose the file type that best describes your data - Delimited or Fixed Width. Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list that appears next to File origin. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 or 3 window. Place a checkmark next to the delimiter that was used in the file you wish to import into Microsoft Excel 2007. The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear based on the delimiter that you chose. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 3 of 3. Choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import. You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want. Click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel 2007. Source: https://www.itg.ias.edu/content/how-import-csv-file-uses-utf-8-character-encoding-0
A truly amazing list of answers, but since one pretty good one is still missing, I'll mention it here: open the csv file with google sheets and save it back to your local computer as an excel file. In contrast to Microsoft, Google has managed to support UTF-8 csv files so it just works to open the file there. And the export to excel format also just works. So even though this may not be the preferred solution for all, it is pretty fail safe and the number of clicks is not as high as it may sound, especially when you're already logged into google anyway.
This is my working solution: vbFILEOPEN = "your_utf8_file.csv" Workbooks.OpenText Filename:=vbFILEOPEN, DataType:=xlDelimited, Semicolon:=True, Local:=True, Origin:=65001 The key is Origin:=65001
Yes it is possible. When writing the stream creating the csv, the first thing to do is this: myStream.Write(Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble(), 0, Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble().Length)
Yes, this is possible. As previously noted by multiple users, there seems to be a problem with excel reading the correct Byte Order Mark when the file is encoded in UTF-8. With UTF-16 it does not seem to have a problem, so it is endemic to UTF-8. The solution I use for this is adding the BOM, TWICE. For this I execute the following sed command twice: sed -I '1s/^/\xef\xbb\xbf/' *.csv , where the wildcard can be replaced with any file name. However, this leads to a mutation of the sep= at the beginning of the .csv file. The .csv file will then open normally in excel, but with an extra row with "sep=" in the first cell. The "sep=" can also be removed in the source .csv itself, but when opening the file with VBA the delimiter should be specified: Workbooks.Open(name, Format:=6, Delimiter:=";", Local:=True) Format 6 is the .csv format. Set Local to true, in case there are dates in the file. If Local is not set to true the dates will be Americanized, which in some cases will corrupt the .csv format.
This is not accurately addressing the question but since i stumbled across this and the above solutions didn't work for me or had requirements i couldn't meet, here is another way to add the BOM when you have access to vim: vim -e -s +"set bomb|set encoding=utf-8|wq" filename.csv
hi i'm using ruby on rails for csv generation. In our application we plan to go for the multi language(I18n) and we faced an issue while viewing I18n content in the CSV file of windows excel.
Was fine with Linux (Ubuntu) and mac.
We identified that windows excel need to be imported the data again to view the actual data. While import we will get more options to choose character set.
But this can’t be educated for each and every user, so solution we looking for is to open just by double click.
Then we identified the way of showing data by open mode and bom in windows excel with the help of aghuddleston gist. Added at reference.
Example I18n content
In Mac and Linux
Swedish : Förnamn
English : First name
In Windows
Swedish : Förnamn
English : First name
def user_information_report(report_file_path, user_id)
user = User.find(user_id)
I18n.locale = user.current_lang
open_mode = "w+:UTF-16LE:UTF-8"
bom = "\xEF\xBB\xBF"
body user, open_mode, bom
end
def headers
headers = [
"ID", "SDN ID",
I18n.t('sys_first_name'), I18n.t('sys_last_name'), I18n.t('sys_dob'),
I18n.t('sys_gender'), I18n.t('sys_email'), I18n.t('sys_address'),
I18n.t('sys_city'), I18n.t('sys_state'), I18n.t('sys_zip'),
I18n.t('sys_phone_number')
]
end
def body tenant, open_mode, bom
File.open(report_file_path, open_mode) do |f|
csv_file = CSV.generate(col_sep: "\t") do |csv|
csv << headers
tenant.patients.find_each(batch_size: 10) do |patient|
csv << [
patient.id, patient.patientid,
patient.first_name, patient.last_name, "#{patient.dob}",
"#{translate_gender(patient.gender)}", patient.email, "#{patient.address_1.to_s} #{patient.address_2.to_s}",
"#{patient.city}", "#{patient.state}", "#{patient.zip}",
"#{patient.phone_number}"
]
end
end
f.write bom
f.write(csv_file)
end
end
Important things to note here is open mode and bom
open_mode = "w+:UTF-16LE:UTF-8"
bom = "\xEF\xBB\xBF"
Before writing the CSV insert BOM
f.write bom
f.write(csv_file)
Windows and Mac
File can be opened directly by double clicking.
Linux (ubuntu)
While opening a file ask for the separator options -> choose “TAB”
Download & install LibreOffice Calc Open the csv file of your choice in LibreOffice Calc Thank the heavens that an import text wizard shows up... ...select your delimiter and character encoding options Select the resulting data in Calc and copy paste to Excel
I faced the same problem a few days ago, and could not find any solution because I cannot use the import from csv feature because it makes everything to be styled as string. My solution was to first open the file with notpad++ and change the encode to ASCII. Then just opened the file in excel and it worked as expected.
Working solution for office 365
save in UTF-16 (no LE, BE)
use separator \t
Code in PHP
$header = ['číslo', 'vytvořeno', 'ěščřžýáíé'];
$fileName = 'excel365.csv';
$fp = fopen($fileName, 'w');
fputcsv($fp, $header, "\t");
fclose($fp);
$handle = fopen($fileName, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($fileName));
$contents = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-16', $contents);
fclose($handle);
$handle = fopen($fileName, "w");
fwrite($handle, $contents);
fclose($handle);
This is an old question but I've just encountered had a similar problem and the solution may help others:
Had the same issue where writing out CSV text data to a file, then opening the resulting .csv in Excel shifts all the text into a single column. After having a read of the above answers I tried the following, which seems to sort the problem out.
Apply an encoding of UTF-8 when you create your StreamWriter. That's it.
Example:
using (StreamWriter output = new StreamWriter(outputFileName, false, Encoding.UTF8, 2 << 22)) {
/* ... do stuff .... */
output.Close();
}
If you want to make it fully automatic, one click, or to load automatically into Excel from say a web page, but can't generate proper Excel files, then I would suggest looking at SYLK format as an alternative. OK it is not as simple as CSV but it is text based and very easy to implement and it supports UTF-8 with no issues. I wrote a PHP class that receives the data and outputs a SYLK file which will open directly in Excel by just clicking the file (or will auto-launch Excel if you write the file to a web page with the correct mime type. You can even add formatting (like bold, format numbers in particular ways etc) and change column sizes, or auto size columns to the text in the columns and all in all the code is probably not more than about 100 lines. It is dead easy to reverse engineer SYLK by creating a simple spreadsheet and saving as SYLK and then reading it with a text editor. The first block are headers and standard number formats that you will recognise (which you just regurgitate in every file you create), then the data is simply an X/Y coordinate and a value.
I am generating csv files from a simple C# application and had the same problem. My solution was to ensure the file is written with UTF8 encoding, like so:
// Use UTF8 encoding so that Excel is ok with accents and such.
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(path, false, Encoding.UTF8))
{
SaveCSV(writer);
}
I originally had the following code, with which accents look fine in Notepad++ but were getting mangled in Excel:
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(path))
{
SaveCSV(writer);
}
Your mileage may vary - I'm using .NET 4 and Excel from Office 365.
I tried everything I could find on this thread and similar, nothing worked fully. However, importing to google sheets and simply downloading as csv worked like a charm. Try it out if you come to my frustration point.
It's March 2022, and it seems we cannot use both a BOM and the sep=... line. Adding the sep=\t or similar, makes Excel ignore the BOM. Using a semicolon seems to be a default Excel understands, in which case we can skip the sep=... line and it works. This is Microsoft 365 with Excel version 2110 build 14527.20276.
Found a solution for ASP.NET Core to download CSV's as UTF8 with POM:
byte[] csvBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(csvString);
UTF8Encoding utf8 = new UTF8Encoding(true);
byte[] bom = utf8.GetPreamble();
var result = bom.Concat(csvBytes).ToArray();
return new FileContentResult(result, MediaTypeHeaderValue.Parse("text/csv; charset=utf-8"));
Excel is recognizes the downloaded CSV file than as UTF8.
Just sharing a comprehensive function that might make your life easier working with CSV files.... please note last function argument in relation to this topic
function array2csv($data, $file = '', $download = true, $mode = 'w+', $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $escape_char = "\\", $addUnicodeBom = false)
{
$return = false;
if ($file == '') {
$f = fopen('php://memory', 'r+');
} else {
$f = fopen($file, $mode);
}
if ($addUnicodeBom) {
$utf8_with_bom = chr(239) . chr(187) . chr(191);
fwrite($f, $utf8_with_bom);
}
foreach ($data as $line => $item) {
fputcsv($f, $item, $delimiter, $enclosure, $escape_char);
}
rewind($f);
if ($download == true) {
$return = stream_get_contents($f);
} else {
$return = true;
}
return $return;
}
First save the Excel spreadsheet as Unicode text. Open the TXT file using Internet explorer and click "Save as" TXT Encoding - choose the appropriate encoding, i.e. for Win Cyrillic 1251
readcsv fails to read # character in Julia
I've been using asd=readcsv(filename) to read a csv file in Julia.
The first row of the csv file contains strings which describe the column contents; the rest of the data is a mix of integers and floats. readcsv reads the numbers just fine, but only reads the first 4+1/2 string entries.
After that, it renders "". If I ask the REPL to display asd[1,:], it tells me it is 1x65 Array{Any,2}.
The fifth column in the first row of the csv file (this seems to be the entry it chokes on) is APP #1 bias voltage [V]; but asd[1,5] is just APP . So it looks to me as though readcsv has choked on the "#" character.
I tried using "quotes=false" keyword in readcsv, but it didn't help.
I used to use xlsread in Matlab and it worked fine.
Has anybody out there seen this sort of thing before?
The comment character in Julia is #, and this applies when reading files from delimited text files. But luckily, the readcsv() and readdlm() functions have an optional argument to help in these situations. You should try readcsv(filename; comment_char = '/'). Of course, the example above assumes that you don't have any / characters in your first line. If you do, then you'll have to change that / above to something else.
CSV file is not recognized
Im exporting an excel file into a .csv file (cause I want to import it into R) but R doesn't recognize it. I think this is because when I open it in notepad I get: Item;Description 1;ja 2;ne While a file which does not have any import issues is structured like this in notepad: "Item","Description" "1","ja" "2","ne" Does anybody know how I can either export it from excel in the right format or import a csv file with ";" seperator into R.
It's easy to deal with semicolon-delimited files; you can use read.csv2() instead of read.csv() (although be aware this will also use comma as the decimal separator character!), or specify sep=";". Sorry to ask, but did you try reading ?read.csv ? The relevant information is in there, although it might admittedly be a little overwhelming/hard to sort out if you're new to R: sep: the field separator character. Values on each line of the file are separated by this character. If ‘sep = ""’ (the default for ‘read.table’) the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.
Fix Special Characters in String
I've got a program that in a nutshell reads values from a SQL database and writes them to a tab-delimited text file. The issue is that some of the values in the database have special characters (TM, dash, ellipsis, etc.) When written to the text file, the formatting is lost and they come across as junk "™ or – etc" When the value is viewed in the immediate window, before it is written to the txt file, everything looks fine. My guess is that this is an issue of encoding. But, I'm not real sure how to proceed, where to look, or what to look for. Is this ASCII or UTF-8? If it's one of those how do I correct it before it's written to the text file. Here's how I build the text file (where feedStr is a StringBuilder) objReader = New StreamWriter(filePath) objReader.Write(feedStr) objReader.Close()
The default encoding for StreamWriter is UTF8 (with no byte order mark). Your result file is ok, the question is what do you open it in afterwards? If you open it in a UTF8 capable text editor, the characters should look the way you want.
You can also write the text file in another encoding, for example iso-8859-1 (latin1)
objReader = New StreamWriter(filePath, false, Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"))