Unable to read hyphenated values in csv

Question

While reading hyphenated values from a csv file, I see the hyphen is gets converted into â€

My csv file contains data such as :

05‐30‐2012,user,500 
06‐30‐2012,user,1500

After reading the lines I get :

05â€30â€2012,user,500 
06â€30â€2012,user,1500

Why is it happening? How do I correct it ?

This is what I have done :

$lines = file('data.csv');  

foreach($lines as $line_num => $line){
  if($line != ''){

  echo '<pre>';
  print_r($line);       
  echo '</pre>';
}

Thanks in advance.

It's a weird Unicode hyphen `U+2010`. You are printing it out in a Latin-1 page. — mario, Oct 19 '12 at 03:24
It's not "encoding" it as that, it's "interpreting" the encoded value. That's probably an `emdash` (of some sort). — Jared Farrish, Oct 19 '12 at 03:25
@Jack - I mean it's being read with the wrong encoding by what's displaying the underlying code. — Jared Farrish, Oct 19 '12 at 03:28
Have you tried [`header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');`](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4279282/set-http-header-to-utf-8-php) before output? — Jared Farrish, Oct 19 '12 at 03:29

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 19 '12 at 04:08

If your output encoding is not UTF-8, then you need to convert your UTF-8 input file to your output encoding. For example, assuming your output to the browser should be ISO-8859-1 (a common default with Apache setups), then utf8_decode will convert your UTF-8 CSV data into the proper encoding.

$lines = file('data.csv');  

foreach($lines as $line_num => $line){
  if($line != ''){

  echo '<pre>';
  print_r(utf8_decode($line));
  echo '</pre>';
}

If you want UTF-8 output (or if you are fine with that), set the default_charset PHP setting as early in your script as possible so PHP will set the correct HTTP header.

ini_set('default_charset','UTF-8');

Unable to read hyphenated values in csv

1 Answers1