Some characters in CSV file are not read during PHP fgetcsv() - php

Question

I am reading a CSV file with php. Many of the rows have a "check mark" which is really the square root symbol: √ and the php code is just skipping over this character every time it is encountered.
Here is my code (printing to the browser window in "CSV style" format so I can check that the lines break at the right place:
$file = fopen($uploadfile, 'r');
while (($line = fgetcsv($file)) !== FALSE) {
foreach ($line as $key => $value) {
if ($value) {
echo $value.",";
}
}
echo "<br />";
}
fclose($file);
As an interim solution, I am just finding and replacing the checkmarks with 1's manually, in Excel. Obviously I'd like a more efficient solution :) Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

fgetcsv() only works on standard ASCII characters; so it's probably "correct" in skipping your square root symbols. However, rather than replacing the checkmarks manually, you could read the file into a string, do a str_replace() on those characters, and then parse it using fgetcsv(). You can turn a string into a file pointer (for fgetcsv) thusly:
$fp = fopen('php://memory', 'rw');
fwrite($fp, (string)$string);
rewind($fp);
while (($line = fgetcsv($fp)) !== FALSE)
...

Answer 2

I had a similar problem with accented first characters of strings. I eventually gave up on fgetscv and did the following, using fgets() and explode() instead (I'm guessing your csv is comma separated):
$file = fopen($uploadfile, 'r');
while (($the_line = fgets($file)) !== FALSE) // <-- fgets
{
$line = explode(',', $the_line); // <-- explode
foreach ($line as $key => $value)
{
if ($value)
{
echo $value.",";
}
}
echo "<br />";
}
fclose($file);

Answer 3

You should setlocale ar written in documentation
Note:
Locale setting is taken into account by this function. If LANG is e.g. en_US.UTF-8, files in one-byte encoding are read wrong by this function.
before fgetcsv add setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF-8'). In my case it was 'lt_LT.UTF-8'.
This behaviour is reported as a php bug