What are common issues with exporting data from a PHP application to Excel, especially regarding special characters like umlauts?

When exporting data from a PHP application to Excel, special characters like umlauts may not display correctly due to encoding issues. To solve this problem, you can use the PHP `utf8_encode()` function to convert the data to UTF-8 encoding before exporting it to Excel. 

// Convert data to UTF-8 encoding before exporting to Excel
$data = array(
    array('Name', 'Ümläut'),
    array('John Doe', 'München')
);

// Create Excel file
$filename = 'export_data_' . date('Y-m-d') . '.xls';

header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $filename . '"');

echo "\xEF\xBB\xBF"; // UTF-8 BOM

echo "<table>";
foreach ($data as $row) {
    echo "<tr>";
    foreach ($row as $cell) {
        echo "<td>" . utf8_encode($cell) . "</td>";
    }
    echo "</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";

Keywords

PHP Excel special characters encoding UTF-8

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