Hebrew letters ignored selectively by fgetcsv - php

Question

I'm trying to read a CSV file in Hebrew in order to insert multiple posts to Wordpress.
I've saved the excel sheet as CSV (coma delimited).
After some encoding manipulation in Sublime Text, I see the Hebrew content normally in any text editor.
However, when I try to read the contents of the file using fgetcsv the Hebrew letters are being ignored selectively, i.e the letters in the field which are preceded with either a number or a Latin letter, ARE showing correctly. Hebrew Letters before the number/Latin letter are ignored and omitted from the output.
If I use file_get_contents and var_dump it, I get the entire content correctly, so it stands to reason that the problem lies with fgetcsv.
Code in functions.php:
function csv_to_array($filename='', $delimiter=',')
{
if(!file_exists($filename) || !is_readable($filename)) {
return FALSE;
}
$header = NULL;
$data = array();
if (($handle = fopen($filename, 'r')) !== FALSE)
{
while (($row = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, $delimiter)) !== FALSE)
{
if(!$header):
$header = $row;
else:
$data[] = $row;
endif;
}
fclose($handle);
}
return $data;
}
used:
if (isset($_FILES['events'])) {
extract($_FILES['events']);
$events = csv_to_array($tmp_name);

Answer 1

Not very likely that the language that gave the world T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM has now problems with Hebrew letters ;-).
Checking the encoding of the strings (var_dump might not be enough!) and Manvel's solution to this question might be of help to you:
The problem is that the function returns UTF-8 (it can check using
mb_detect_encoding), but do not convert, and these characters
take UTF-8. Тherefore, it's necessary to do the reverse-convert to
initial encoding (Windows-1251 or CP1251) using iconv. But since
fgetcsv returns an array, I suggest to write a custom function:
function customfgetcsv(&$handle, $length, $separator = ';'){
if(($buffer = fgets($handle, $length)) !== false) {
return explode( $separator, iconv( "CP1251", "UTF-8", $buffer ) );
}
return false;
}