Microsoft Excel mangles Diacritics in .csv files?

Question

I am programmatically exporting data (using PHP 5.2) into a .csv test file.
Example data: Numéro 1 (note the accented e). The data is utf-8 (

Answer 1

The CSV format is implemented as ASCII, not unicode, in Excel, thus mangling the diacritics. We experienced the same issue which is how I tracked down that the official CSV standard was defined as being ASCII-based in Excel.