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

With Ruby 1.8.7 I encode every field to UTF-16 and discard BOM (maybe).

The following code is extracted from active_scaffold_export:

<%                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
      require 'fastercsv'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
      fcsv_options = {                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
        :row_sep => "\n",                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
        :col_sep => params[:delimiter],                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
        :force_quotes => @export_config.force_quotes,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
        :headers => @export_columns.collect { |column| format_export_column_header_name(column) }                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
      }                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

      data = FasterCSV.generate(fcsv_options) do |csv|                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
        csv << fcsv_options[:headers] unless params[:skip_header] == 'true'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
        @records.each do |record|                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
          csv << @export_columns.collect { |column|                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
            # Convert to UTF-16 discarding the BOM, required for Excel (> 2003 ?)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
            Iconv.conv('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', get_export_column_value(record, column))[2..-1]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
          }                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
        end                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
      end                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
    -%><%= data -%>

The important line is:

Iconv.conv('UTF-16', 'UTF-8', get_export_column_value(record, column))[2..-1]