What are best practices for handling special characters like umlauts in CSV files generated by PHP scripts?

Special characters like umlauts can cause issues when generating CSV files in PHP due to encoding problems. To handle these special characters properly, it is recommended to use UTF-8 encoding for both reading and writing CSV files. This can be achieved by setting the appropriate header and encoding options when opening the CSV file for writing. 

// Set UTF-8 encoding for CSV output
header('Content-Type: text/csv; charset=utf-8');
$fp = fopen('output.csv', 'w');

// Write CSV data with UTF-8 encoding
fputcsv($fp, array('Name', 'City', 'Country'), ',', '"');

// Example data with special characters
$data = array('Müller', 'Berlin', 'Deutschland');
fputcsv($fp, $data, ',', '"');

fclose($fp);

Keywords

PHP CSV files special characters umlauts encoding.

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