Comments on: Japanese-language CSV export for Excel

By: monaye

monaye — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:37:45 +0000

Saving from Excel to CSV works great on Open Office. It has great options, you can easily chose, "Charset" -> all the encoding including UTF8, Filed Delimiter -> tab space ; , : and text delimiter -> " " or ' ' .

By: Boolio

Boolio — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:24:11 +0000

Wow, just use spencers suggestion and it will convert to Japanese.

By: monaye

monaye — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:19:04 +0000

Unbelievable! Excel 2007 can't handle save as to csv with Japanese/Chinese/Korean.. other than english..
I will try open office as you suggest.

By: Spencer

Spencer — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:47:07 +0000

In Excel, you can use Import functionality (Import From Text) where you can specify the encoding format. Selecting “65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)” should import the CSV properly.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:54:40 +0000

Unfortunately, this solution didnt helped in my case. I am using PHP/mySQL.

header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel;charset=Shift_JIS");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"products.csv\"");

Not displaying Japanese characters in Japanese enabled MS Excel :(

Any clue?

By: mike

mike — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:43:58 +0000

Wow bloody hell! And I thought I had a pretty deep trip into Excel's code nonsense! But you definitely outdone me by a huge margin! :)

Thanks for sharing!

By the way, I have also saw some info on the net that you can export your tabular data as a HTML table, and import that into Excel. Haven't tried that myself, so I'm not sure what will happen with non-Roman characters inside these tables, even given the correct document encoding - but that might be another thing to try.

By: Yves

Yves — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:32:37 +0000

I got exactly the same problem. And the same frustration. Also the same irritation!

Excel does not bother checking the encoding of the incoming csv file (unless all encoded characters are affected, like utf16. sjis…, unlike utf-8).

I didn't want to affect the whole data and change the encoding of the exported csv text (like UTF-16 or SJIS) in order to keep some consistency along the whole data processing chain (utf-8 encoding).

So finally I changed the output to a XML text.

Advantages: keep utf-8 and a human readable output. Also you can specify data types accurately.

Drawbacks: use the internal coding of Excel and discover the incredible lack of flexibility of the software… When specifying a type, data cannot be blank (except String) and has to be provided the exact same way!
I also uncovered an interesting Excel specificity: any time hh:mm is actually a date, and dates start from 1899-12-31(?!), so 26:00 is actually 1900-01-01T02:00:00.000 ; that's not really a problem ; however some Excel versions consider 1900 to be a leap year, and when hours:minutes exceed 2 months…