PHP generated csv file is displaying £ for a UK pound sign (£) in Excel 2007

Question

I'm generating the csv file with the following header commands:

header("Content-type: text/csv; charset=utf-8; encoding=utf-8");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="products.csv"');

If I open the file in Excel 2007, then I get £ wherever a £ sign should appear. However, if I open the file in Notepad++, then the pound signs appear fine; similarly, if I change the content-type to text/plain and get rid of the attachement header, the pound signs appear correctly in the browser.

One strange thing is that if I go to the "Format" menu in Notepad++, it appears that the file is encoded in "UTF-8 without BOM". If I change this to "Encode in UTF-8", then save the file, the pound signs appear correctly in Excel. Is there a way to make it so that the file is saved in this encoding by PHP?

Solution 1

Output 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF before emitting the CSV data. Don't forget to increase the content length header by 3 if you handle it.

header('Content-type: text/csv;');
header('Content-Length: ' + strlen($content) + 3);
header('Content-disposition: attachment;filename=UK_order_' . date('Ymdhis') . '.csv');
echo "\xef\xbb\xbf";
echo $content;
exit;

Solution 2

Use utf8_decode() - WORKED FOR ME

Solution 3

header("Expires: Mon, 26 Nov 1962 00:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate('D,d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT');
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header('Content-Type: text/csv;');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$savename);
echo utf8_decode($csv_string);

Posted as above by user769889 but I missed it with my frustrations with this v-annoying issue, all fixed now and working. Hope this helps someone...