RUBY_VERSION = ruby-1.8.7-p358 RAILS_VERSION = rails (2.3.2)
code snippet
```
def export_to_excel
csv_text = get_csv_string
headers['Content-Type'] = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
headers['Cache-Control'] = ''
send_data csv_text, :type => 'text/csv; charset=utf-8; header=present', :disposition => "attachment;filename = "new_report.csv"
end
```
Problem : When I download the file and open it in Excel or Libre office it shows junk characters. I have to manually go and set the encoding as UTF-8 for the characters in file to be recognised.
Thing I've tried out
- Character encoding issue exporting rails data to CSV
- changing the csv string using Iconv to WINDOWS-1252 using Iconv.iconv('UTF-8//IGNORE', 'WINDOWS-1252', final_csv_str)
- I'm using FasterCSV.generate to create the csv string. I've tried using FasterCSV.generate(:encoding => "u"). This also didn't work since the default itself is utf-8.
- When I opened the file in LibreOffice by default it was selecting the encoding as ISO-8859-14. I tried converting UTF-8 to that format as well. It didn't workout.
I'm guessing there is some kind of header that I should prepend to the file itself, for the file to be recognised as UTF-8 encoding, Since setting the charset=utf-8 will only notify the browser.
Can anybody suggest some ideas ?
UPDATE :
My actual requirement was to make the files work without needing the user to do any additional steps. For this requirement the following solution works
- Convert CSV to UTF-16
- Insert BOM at beginning of file
- Use tab as field separator
Someone went and tried out all combinations of the above three and found this out. Reference : https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/ABAP/CSV+tests+of+encoding+and+column+separator?original_fqdn=wiki.sdn.sap.com
The source which led to above link is from this post :
Microsoft Excel mangles Diacritics in .csv files?
For our use case just prepending BOM character sequence ("\xEF\xBB\xBF") to beginning of csv string works.
Reference :
How to write BOM marker to a file in Ruby
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