exporting php output as excel - php

Question

include_once 'mysqlconn.php';
include_once "functions.php";
$filename = $_GET['par'].".xls";
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($filename).'"');
if ($_GET['i'] == "par1") {
func1();
} else if ($_GET['i'] == "par2") {
echo "şşşıııİİİ";
func2();
} else if ($_GET['i'] == "par3") {
echo "şşşıııİİİ";
func3();
}
this is my export2excel.php file and func1,2,3 are in functions.php file and produces table output all work well except character encoding in a strange way. I am using utf-8 encoding for all my files. 2nd else if statement above produces healthy encoded output but rest 2 are encodes my output with strange characters like "BÃœTÇE İÇİ". it is "BÜTÇE İÇİ" in turkish.
in short. same files, same encoding, same database but different results.
any idea?

Answer 1

Excel uses UTF-16LE + BOM as default Unicode encoding.
So you have to convert your output to UTF-16LE and prepend the UTF-16LE-BOM "\xFF\xFE".
Some further information:
Microsoft Excel mangles Diacritics in .csv files?
Exporting data to CSV and Excel in your Rails apps
Instead I would use one of the existing libraries
PHP Excel Extension PECL extension by Ilia Alshanetsky (Core PHP Developer & Release Master)
Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR Package
PHPExcel
Edit:
Some code that could help if you really not want to use an existing library
<?php
$output = <<<EOT
<table>
<tr>
<td>Foo</td>
<td>IñtërnâtiônàlizætiøöäÄn</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Bar</td>
<td>Перевод русского текста в транслит</td>
</tr>
</table>
EOT;
// Convert to UTF-16LE
$output = mb_convert_encoding($output, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
// Prepend BOM
$output = "\xFF\xFE" . $output;
header('Pragma: public');
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="utf8_bom.xls"');
echo $output;

Answer 2

if anyone is trying to use the excel_writer in moodle and is getting encoding issues with output - say if you're developing a report that has a url as data in a field - then in this instance to simply fix this issue I wrapped the data in quotes so it at least opened up in excel here's my example:
// Moodles using the PEAR excel_writer export
$table->setup();
$ex=new table_excel_export_format($table);
$ex->start_document( {string} );
$ex->start_table( {string} );
// heading on the spreadsheet
$title = array('Report Title'=>'Report 1');
$ex->add_data($title);
// end heading
$ex->output_headers( array_keys($table->columns) );
**foreach($data as $row){
$string="'".trim($row->resname,"'")."'";
$row->resname=$string;
$ex->add_data( $table->get_row_from_keyed($row) );
}**
$ex->finish_table();
$ex->finish_document();

Answer 3

Excel uses UTF-16LE as the default encoding. So you should either convert UTF-8 to UTF-16LE yourself or use one of the tried and tested Excel PHP libs instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. I would recommend using PHPExcel...