Why do letters like é, å, ä, ö disappear?

Craig Phillips

Dec 23 |12:53 PM

Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 May 2011 12:09

Untitled document

Quick Answer

The EasyTable component as mentioned elsewhere, uses the CSV parser built into PHP, which probably follows the RFC for CSV files very closely.

According to the RFC any field in a CSV file should only contain text data (remember this is an old standard from before the internet, and text basically means a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and a few special characters).

Note that those ranges don't include unicode characters outside of the original ASCII character set . If your CSV file has Unicode characters the PHP parser probably drops them (either that, or we've made a mistake).

How do I fix this?

The program that's exporting the data should already do that for you (although some don't). Basically Ó would under normal conversion rules change to either O or Ö based on options your program may support. For example one of our users reported that he successfully converted the file to CSV UTF8 by:

opening the excel-generated csv file with notepad, and overwritting it saving the file as a UTF-8 text-file,

Some common encoding examples:

Ö becomes Ö

É becomes É

Ë becomes Ë

Ó becomes Ó

To make your CSV file work reliably you will need to convert it's non-ASCII characters to HTML equivalent entities. There are tools available on the web that will do some degree of HTML entity conversion for you, two examples we're aware of are:

A bit more technically

Fields in CSV files are considered to be TEXTDATA, where TEXTDATA = %x20-21 / %x23-2B / %x2D-7E

The section below expands out the hex values to their common text equivalents:

20:21
[space] !

23:24:25:26:27:28:29:2A:2B
# $ % & ' ( ) * +

2D:2E:2F
- . /

30:31:32:33:34:35:36:37:38:39:3A:3B:3C:3D:3E:3F
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?

40:41:42:43:44:45:46:47:48:49:4A:4B:4C:4D:4E:4F
@ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O

50:51:52:53:54:55:56:57:58:59:5A:5B:5C:5D:5E:5F
P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _

60:61:62:63:64:65:66:67:68:69:6A:6B:6C:6D:6E:6F
` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o

70:71:72:73:74:75:76:77:78:79:7A:7B:7C:7D:7E
p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~

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