Encoding issue with PHP while writing in a .csv file - php

Question

I'm working with a php array which contains some values parsed from a previous scraping process (using Simple HTML DOM Parser). I can normally print / echo the values of this array, which contains special chars é,à,è, etc. BUT, the problem is the following :
When I'm using fwrite to save values in a .csv file, some characters are not successfully saved. For example, Székesfehérvár is well displayed on my php view in HTML, but saved as Székesfehérvár in the .csv file which I generate with the php script above.
I've already set-up several things in the php script :
The page I'm scraping seems to be utf-8 encoded
My PHP script is also declared as utf-8 in the header
I've tried a lot of iconv and mb_encode methods in different places in the code
NOTE that when I'm make a JS console.log of my php array, using json_encode, the characters are also broken, maybe linked to the original encoding of the page I'm scraping?
Here's a part of the script, it is the part who is writing values in a .csv file
<?php
$data = array(
array("item1", "item2"),
array("item1", "item2"),
array("item1", "item2"),
array("item1", "item2")
// ...
);
//filename
$filename = 'myFileName.csv';
foreach($data as $line) {
$string_txt = ""; //declares the content of the .csv as a string
foreach($line as $item) {
//writes a new line of the .csv
$line_txt = "";
//each line of the .csv equals to the values of the php subarray, tab separated
$line_txt .= $item . "\t";
}
//PHP endline constant, indicates the next line of the .csv
$line_txt .= PHP_EOL;
//add the line to the string which is the global content of the .csv
$line_txt .= $string_txt;
}
//writing the string in a .csv file
$file = fopen($filename, 'w+');
fwrite($file, $string_txt);
fclose($file);
I am currently stuck because I can't save values with accentuated characters correctly.

Answer 1

Put this line in your code
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
Hope this helps you!

Answer 2

Try it
$file = fopen('myFileName.csv','w');
$data= array_map("utf8_decode", $data);
fputcsv($file,$data);

Answer 3

Excel has problems displaying utf8 encoded csv files. I saw this before. But you can try utf8 BOM. I tried it and works for me. This is simply adding these bytes at the start of your utf8 string:
$line_txt .= chr(239) . chr(187) . chr(191) . $item . "\t";
For more info:
Encoding a string as UTF-8 with BOM in PHP
Alternatively, you can use the file import feature in Excel and make sure the file origin says 65001 : Unicode(UTF8). It should display your text properly and you will need to save it as an Excel file to preserve the format.

Answer 4

The solution (provided by #misorude) :
When scraping HTML contents from webpages, there is a difference between what's displayed in your debug and what's really scraped in the script. I had to use html_entity_decode to let PHP interpret the true value of the HTML code I've scraped, and not the browser's interpretation.
To validate a good retriving of values before store them somewhere, you could try a console.log in JS to see if values are correctly drived :
PHP
//decoding numeric HTML entities who represents "Sóstói Stadion"
$b = html_entity_decode("Sóstói Stadion");
Javascript (to test):
<script>
var b = <?php echo json_encode($b) ;?>;
//print "Sóstói Stadion" correctly
console.log(b);
</script>