Exporting to csv – ’ replacing ‘

Filed under Web Design and Build. Last updated:2 March 2014 at 2:18 pm.

Came across an interesting and frustrating issue last week. A client was exporting selected data from a WordPress database (actually using this plugin), and the user was seeing odd characters in the csv output. The most obvious was the replacement of single apostrophes: ‘ with this: ’.

Clearly an encoding problem but I couldn’t immediately see why. Pages displaying the data were fine, web pages and the database were all set to use utf-8. I finally solved the problem by forcing the encoding of the csv file via:

$text = mb_convert_encoding($text,'windows-1252');

Hope this helps someone else…

2 responses to “Exporting to csv – ’ replacing ‘”

  1. Simon says:
    November 12, 2015 at 11:01 am

    Hi Tom
    I think in this case I edited the plugin that was creating the export directly to force the encoding.
    Regards
    Simon

  2. Tom Addis says:
    November 12, 2015 at 10:38 am

    Hi Simon,

    Thanks for posting about this problem – I’ve been searching but can’t find any solution to my .csv encoding troubles.

    Would you be able to let me know where you added this code – child theme functions file?

    Any advice much appreciated!

    Thanks,

    Tom

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