Special characters in CSV files

If you have special characters in your CSV file please read this article to sort out your issue.

Download a software called OpenOffice.org Calc (which is similar to Excel and free) from : http://www.openoffice.org/

Follow the steps given below to change a CSV file to use UTF-8 encoding with OpenOffice.org Calc, follow these steps:

  1. Open your CSV file in OpenOffice.org Calc with its original encoding, e.g. Western Europe (Windows-1252/WinLatin1).
  2. Verify that your special characters are appearing properly – if they are not, try another encoding when you open the file.
  3. Go to File -> Save As and save the CSV file as an ODF Spreadsheet (in the ‘Save as Type’ drop-down).
  4. Go to File -> Save As again and save the ODF file as a CSV again (Text CSV).
  5. If you are prompted to Keep Current Format or Save in ODF Format, select to Keep Current Format.
  6. You will now be prompted to choose the character set, so choose UTF-8 from the drop-down.

The newly saved CSV file will now have a UTF-8 encoding, with all the special characters converted properly. You can then upload the file and it will preserve the special characters.

I am also suggesting you to do this :–> In your database for all the fields of all your tables select collation as utf8_general_ci.

This is because when a user of your site will give some special characters from any input field like text-box then you won’t get error for this characters too.

Note: The OpenOffice does not convert each and every character every time. The exported CSV file having some extra ordinary special characters may not converted. For this you can not use the CSV file. You ‘ll need to remove special characters from the file. Also the above solution will work for importing posts not for exporting them.