Excel won't handle UTF-8 in CSV? Force a different encoding in PHP
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When generating a CSV file with PHP in the UTF-8 encoding, Microsoft Excel freaks out. It just doesn’t show the proper encoding. Thank you Microsoft! However, I did find a way to handle this encoding and make it compatible for Windows/Microsoft Excel.
Instead of outputing with encoding of UTF-8, change it on the fly to Windows-1251. This can be accomplished with mb_convert_encoding(). Check it out:
$csvOutput .= mb_convert_encoding(implode(',', $value), 'Windows-1251', 'UTF-8');