What is “ANSI as UTF-8” and how can I make fputcsv() generate UTF-8 w/BOM?

Question

I made a PHP script that generates CSV files that were previously generated by another process. And then, the CSV files have to be imported by yet another process.

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Answer 1

It is worth noting that ANSI as UTF-8, i.e. UTF-8 without the BOM is useful if you are formatting your PHP files as UTF-8. If your PHP file is outputting html to the browser then the BOM is included in the HTML output which the w3c validator explicitly warns against:

Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File.

The Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded files is known to cause problems for some text editors and older browsers. You may want to consider avoiding its use until it is better supported.

Further to this, I spotted that the BOM confuses Firefox's Firebug which now thinks that all your content is actually in the tag.