Ruby CSV incorrect first character

Question

I have an xlsx file, I do the following to export it as a .csv :

Export xlsx file as csv using excel, default encoding
Open .csv file with notepad, save it again by specifying the encoding utf8 (notepad saves the BOM)
Open the file with CSV.read(path_to_file)

It seems to work well, but for some reason the first header is corrupted by some unknown character (I have no idea what it is, and when I try to copy paste it it disappears, it is represented as a big white rectangle in Windows)

When I open my file with any text editor, there doesn't seem to be a problem

First line looks like : Id;Type....

In case this helps

csv.headers.first # => ".Id" where . is that character
csv.headers.first.first.bytes # => [239, 187, 191]
csv.headers.first.first.b # => "\xEF\xBB\xBF"

How do I fix that ?

Windows 10, Ruby 2.2

This could help: [How to avoid tripping over UTF-8 BOM when reading files](http://stackoverflow.com/q/543225/477037) — Stefan, Jun 05 '16 at 20:33
How come this BOM is not detected by the CSV parser automatically ? — Cyril Duchon-Doris, Jun 05 '16 at 20:55

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 05 '16 at 20:33

1

That is the UTF-8 BOM. Try setting the mode like this:

CSV.read(path_to_file, 'r:bom|utf-8')

answered Jun 05 '16 at 20:33

Ruby CSV incorrect first character

1 Answers1