Issue with UTF-/ encoding on csv file for excel

Question

EDIT:

As suggested special chars are displayed correctly if I use notepad++ to open the csv file. They are displayed correctly too when I import the csv file into excel. How can I generate a csv file that is displayed correctly when opened by excel since file importing is not an option for the users

I'm generating a csv file that is being processed using Excel. Special caracters like 'é' are not displayed properly when the file is opened with excel

This the poc I'm using to generate the csv file

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import unicodecsv as csv
import codecs
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")
def write_csv(file,headers):


    resultFile =codecs.open(file, "w+", "utf-8")

    #headers=[s.encode('utf-8') for s in headers]
    wr = csv.writer(resultFile, dialect='excel',delimiter=";",encoding="utf-8")
    wr.writerow(headers)

    resultFile.close()

headers=[""]
headers.append("Command")
headers.append("Vérification".encode('utf-8'))
write_csv(r"C:\test2.csv",headers)

Solution 1

I fixed this issue using UTF-8 BOM encoding.

# -*- coding: utf-8-sig-*-
import unicodecsv as csv
import codecs
import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8-sig")
def write_csv(file,headers):


    resultFile =codecs.open(file, "w+", "utf-8-sig")

    #headers=[s.encode('utf-8') for s in headers]
    wr = csv.writer(resultFile, dialect='excel',delimiter=";",encoding="utf-8-sig")
    wr.writerow(headers)

    resultFile.close()

headers=[""]
headers.append("Command")
headers.append("Vérification")
write_csv(r"C:\Users\ATHENA-HDA\AppData\Local\Temp\test2.txt",headers)

Solution 2

Python 2 solution using unicodecsv. Note that the documentation for unicodecsv says the module should be opened in binary mode (wb). Make sure to write Unicode strings. #coding is required to support non-ASCII characters in the source file. Make sure to save the source file in UTF-8.

#coding:utf8
import unicodecsv

with open('test.csv','wb') as f:
    # Manually encode a BOM, utf-8-sig didn't work with unicodecsv
    f.write(u'\ufeff'.encode('utf8'))
    w = unicodecsv.writer(f,encoding='utf8')
    # Write Unicode strings.
    w.writerow([u'English',u'Chinese'])
    w.writerow([u'American',u'美国人'])
    w.writerow([u'Chinese',u'中国人'])

Python 3 solution. #coding is optional here because it defaults to UTF-8. Just make sure to save the source file in UTF-8. unicodecsv is no longer required. The built-in csv works correctly. csv documentation says to open the file with newline=''.

#coding:utf8
import csv

with open('test.csv','w',newline='',encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    # Write Unicode strings.
    w.writerow([u'English',u'Chinese'])
    w.writerow([u'American',u'美国人'])
    w.writerow([u'Chinese',u'中国人'])

Solution 3

In python3 I just do this:

with open(file, "w+", encoding='utf-8-sig') as f:
                f.write("Vérification")

Pretty simple, right? :) You can search "utf-8-sig" in the python docs

Comments

[Mark Tolonen]

Overkill. The reload(sys) trick is not needed and can cause errors. See: why setdefaultencoding will break code. The #coding statement declares the encoding of the source file, so hopefully you saved the source file in UTF-8 w/ BOM. csv.writer doesn't support an encoding parameter. In fact, in Python 2 csv doesn't support encodings directly (see csv documentation for a workaround). In Python 3, all that is required is opening the file with an encoding.

[Mark Tolonen]

Adding a BOM is the solution to opening a CSV correctly in Excel, however.

[Mark Tolonen]

Sorry, I didn't see you were using unicodecsv. My comments about csv.writer pertain to the built-in csv module.

[Michel Fernandes]

Saved my day! Works perfect good with latin characters, such as ç, á, é, í.

[Ricky Levi]

example works everywhere but on my Mac's excel app