CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

A CiviCRM contact-search export will not display special characters (é ñ etc.) properly if the file is opened by Excel or another windows based apllication. This problem does not occur using Open Office.

After trying a lot of things I can only solve this by changing the encoding to UTF-16. It looks like this is the only encoding that supports MultiByte charachters in Excel.

I addapted the encoding in CRM/Core/Report/Excel to UTF-16 by adding this line just prior the echo to file lines:

$out = mb_convert_encoding($out, "UTF-16", "UTF-8");

I know not all installs have access to mb_convert_encoding, but for those who have it, this might be a good solution.
If it is, is it feasible to have en admin-option to select the export encoding to UTF-16? If this option is set, the encoding will be set as described above.

Well that's the point.
For my end-users "saving as and selecting the proper encoding"  is not an option.
Also we have a use-case where after saving the export, another application (Excel-like) will take care of the processing of the file.
The current CRM-application (the one CiviCRM is replacing) can do this without handchanging the file encoding by the end-user.

So I'll have to change this in the code (I promised them improvements  )