I am facing a strange issue when extracting data from a MySql database and inserting it in a CSV file. In the database, the field value is the following:
K Secure Connection 1 año 1 PC
When I echo it before writing it to the CSV file, I get the same as the above in my terminal.
I use the following code to write content to the CSV file:
fwrite($this->fileHandle, utf8_encode($lineContent . PHP_EOL));
Yet, when I open the CSV with LibreOffice Calc (and specify UTF-8 as the encoding format), the following is displayed:
K Secure Connection 1 año 1 PC
I have no idea why this happens. Can someone explain how to solve this?
REM:
SELECT @@character_set_database;
returns
latin1
REM 2:
`var_dump($lineContent, bin2hex($lineContent))`
gives
string(39) "Kaspersky Secure Connection 1 año 1 PC"
string(78) "4b6173706572736b792053656375726520436f6e6e656374696f6e20312061c3b16f2031205043"
The var_dump shows that the string is already encoded in UTF-8. Using utf8_encode on it will garble it (the function attempts a conversion from Latin-1 to UTF-8). You're therefore actually writing "año" encoded in UTF-8 into your file, which is then "correctly" picked up by LibreOffice.
Simply don't utf8_encode.
I would try to open the csv file with other editor just to make sure te problem is not with the office...
You may be double encoding the content if it is already in UTF-8 format.
I also prefer to aways work with UTF-8, so I get the data from database already in UTF-8 and no more convertion is needed. For that I run this query right after opening the SQL connection:
"set names 'utf8'"