I have a Java app which reads CSV files which have been created in Excel (e.g. 2007). Does anyone know what charset MS Excel uses to save these files in?
I would have guessed either:
but I am unable to decode extended chars (e.g. french accentuated letters) using either of these charset types.
I had a similar problem last week. I received a number of CSV files with varying encodings. Before importing into the database I then used the chardet libary to automatically sniff out the correct encoding.
Chardet is a port from Mozillas character detection engine and if the sample size is large enough (one accentuated character will not do) works really well.
Russian Edition offers CSV, CSV (Macintosh) and CSV (DOS).
When saving in plain CSV, it uses windows-1251.
I just tried to save French word Résumé along with the Russian text, it saved it in HEX like 52 3F 73 75 6D 3F, 3F being the ASCII code for question mark.
When I opened the CSV file, the word, of course, became unreadable (R?sum?)
Excel 2010 saves an UTF-16/UCS-2 TSV file, if you select File > Save As > Unicode Text (.txt). It's (force) suffixed ".txt", which you can change to ".tsv".
If you need CSV, you can then convert the TSV file in a text editor like Notepad++, Ultra Edit, Crimson Editor etc, replacing tabs by semi-colons, commas or the like. Note that e.g. for reading into a DB table, often TSV works fine already (and it is often easier to read manually).
If you need a different code page like UTF-8, use one of the above mentioned editors for converting.
You can create CSV file using encoding UTF8 + BOM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark).
First three bytes are BOM (0xEF,0xBB,0xBF) and then UTF8 content.
OOXML files like those that come from Excel 2007 are encoded in UTF-8, according to wikipedia. I don't know about CSV files, but it stands to reason it would use the same format...
