The biggest problem is not CSV itself, but that the primary tool used to interact with it is Excel. In our case, handling school data from around the world, correctly handling non-ASCII characters is of the utmost importance. However, if there is a need for any sort of non-ASCII character, there is some work ahead. If the data is pure ASCII (bytes 0-127) you’ll be fine.

It is the lingua franca, everyone can get us CSVs.ĬSV to the casual observer seems a simple portable format, but its looks are deceiving. There are hundreds if not thousands of SIS’s out there, but what the vast majority have in common is the ability to export CSV. The company I work for manages a self-service data import system, handling information from school districts “Student Information Systems”. Current versions of Excel will only reliably load a UTF-8 CSV if a UTF-8 BOM is in place. It would appear that the stricken above was incorrect. Best of all it appears if there is a BOM, it leaves it, if there isn't it doesn't add one. In my testing it appears to safely both load and save.

There is a new format in the save dialog CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) which is distinct from Comma Separated Values which is also still in there. It would appear in a recent update Microsoft has added support for safely reading and writing UTF-8 CSVs to Excel. UPDATE : In the three years since this article was written, parts of the article, in particular talking about UTF-8 are thankfully no longer accurate. Comments: 22 Tags: Strange Behaviour Microsoft Excel Encoding CSV By Jesse Donat on Jun.

Encoding in excel