php exporting to excel using utf8 - php

Question

I have a piece of php code that exports data from mysql to excel. even using
utf-8 for charset, Persian(arabic) are saved weird and they are not recognizable.
If you can help me I will be grateful.
<?php
$con=mysqli_connect("localhost","root","","myDB");
$SQL = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM view1");
$header = '';
$result ='';
$exportData = mysql_query ($SQL ) or die ( "Sql error : " . mysql_error( ) );
$fields = mysql_num_fields ( $exportData );
for ( $i = 0; $i < $fields; $i++ )
{
$header .= mysql_field_name( $exportData , $i ) . "\t";
}
while( $row = mysql_fetch_row( $exportData ) )
{
$line = '';
foreach( $row as $value )
{
if ( ( !isset( $value ) ) || ( $value == "" ) )
{
$value = "\t";
}
else
{
$value = str_replace( '"' , '""' , $value );
$value = '"' . $value . '"' . "\t";
}
$line .= $value;
}
$result .= trim( $line ) . "\n";
}
$result = str_replace( "\r" , "" , $result );
if ( $result == "" )
{
$result = "\nNo Record(s) Found!\n";
}
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=export.xls");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
print "$header\n$result";
?>

Answer 1

Php native support for this is not that good.
Have you tried php-gd-farsi?
include('php-gd-farsi-master/FarsiGD.php');
$gd = new FarsiGD();
// Create a 300x100 image
$im = imagecreatetruecolor(300, 100);
$red = imagecolorallocate($im, 0xFF, 0x00, 0x00);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00);
// Make the background red
imagefilledrectangle($im, 0, 0, 299, 99, $red);
// Path to our ttf font file
//$font_file = './Vera.ttf';
$font_file = './cour.ttf';
// Draw the text 'PHP Manual' using font size 13
$text = imagecreatetruecolor(200, 60);
imagefilledrectangle($text, 0, 0, 200, 60, $red);
$str = '**ماه**';
$tx = $gd->persianText($str, 'fa', 'normal');
imagefttext($text, 24, 10, 10, 50, $black, $font_file,$tx );
$im = $text;
// Output image to the browser
header('Content-Type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);