creating excel with Greek characters - php

Question

i have used the following headers in order to create xls files that contains Greek characters on the fly.
first attempt:
header("Content-Type: application/$file_type;charset=utf-8");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file_name.$file_ending");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
second attempt:
header("Content-Type: application/$file_type;charset=windows-1253");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file_name.$file_ending");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
the created file althought it contains the correct Greek characters (viewed with a text editor) when i open it at the ms-excel the Greek characters are shown as sympols.
i have also tried a library that creates xls (open xls binary format) with the same outcome. This library has options to set the codepage and the charset but still nothing.
any ideas?
thanks.

Answer 1

If you're using a library then it should have a function to set the encoding to UTF-8. For example, with PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer (http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/redirected), you would do:
<?php
$workSheet = & $workBook -> addWorksheet('Students');
$workSheet -> setInputEncoding('utf-8');
?>
Of course, you must also make sure that your data are actually utf-8 and not ISO-8859-7 or windows-1253 for example.
Be aware that this does not support workbook name changing (ie using 'Μαθητές' instead of 'Students')

Answer 2

I'm not so sure about XLS files but if you'd rather use Excel readable CSV files, use UTF-16 encoding (with BOM) and tabs as separators
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=export.csv');
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Pragma: public');
echo chr(255) . chr(254); // Add UTF-16 little-endian BOM
echo mb_convert_encoding("α\tβ\tγ"), 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8'); // from UTF-8 to UTF-16