[RESOLVED] EN/FR/CN UTF-8 db results output via octet-stream to csv file = headache

[steamPunk]

Hi

I have a UTF-8 db table 'clients' that i select for new user accounts and i need to output the results via octet-stream to a csv file so it will open in Excel

If I have the octet-stream charset as UTF-8 all the accented characters in French and all the chinese characters are messed-up - though it displays fine as a text file in Notepad

If I force the charset back into iso-8859-1 and use utf8_decode() on the vars then the English and French texts are fine but of course the chinese won't display properly in Excel !

does anyone know if there's any way I can force Excel to accept the utf-8-ness of the characters ?

this one has been causing me a headache for 3 days now!!!

thanks for any help you can give

[steamPunk]

FYI - here's how you do it, thanks to the "Excel Writer" class written by Harish Chauhan at http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2037.html

to get it to work with French and Chinese in UTF-8 and auto-download the xls file you need to change line 106 of excelwriter.inc.php to

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

and put a few extra lines of code in the way it's implemented :

$excel=new ExcelWriter("export.xls");

if($excel==false){
echo $excel->error;
}

// write the rows in the xls file
$myArr=array("Nom","Prénom","Date naissance","Email","Titre","Adresse","C. P.","Ville","Tél","Pays","Langue","date inscr.","Comment","Fichiers");
$excel->writeLine($myArr);

$excel->close();

// you can't have this or the following headers won't work
//echo "data is write into myXls.xls Successfully."; 

$export_file = "export.xls";
header ("Content-type: application/octet-stream;");
header("Expires: 0");
header ("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D,d M YH:i:s") . " GMT");
header ("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header ("Pragma: no-cache");
header ("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"".$export_file."\"" );
readfile($export_file);
exit;