Ruby: How to generate CSV files that has Excel-friendly encoding

Question

I am generating CSV files that needs to be opened and reviewed in Excel once they have been generated. It seems that Excel requires a different encoding than UTF-8.

Answer 1

You should switch the encoding to ISO-8859-1 as following:

CSV.generate(encoding: 'ISO-8859-1') { |csv|  csv << ["Text á", "Text é", "Text æ"] }

For your context, you can do this:

config = {
  col_sep: ';',
  row_sep: ';',
  encoding: 'ISO-8859-1'
}

CSV.generate(config) { |csv|  csv << ["Text á", "Text é", "Text æ"] }

I had the same issue and that encoding fixed.