Exporting CSV in french language shows junk charcters

Question

I am having a problem in exporting a csv file using au.com.bytecode.opencsv.CSVWriter. I did something like:

File file = File.createTempFile("UserDetails_", ".csv"); CSVWriter writer = new CSVWriter(new OutputStreamWriter( new FileOutputStream(file), "UTF-8"), ',');

and then when I exporting the .csv file, it shows the junk characters for french letters.[Data to be saved in the .csv are french characters]. But previously I was doing something like:

CSVWriter writer = new CSVWriter(new FileWriter(file));, then it was perfectly showing all french characters in Windows environment, but in Prod environment[Linux] it was showing junks. So I thought to use the Character set UTF-8 for the file format to be exported.

How can I get rid of the problem? Please Suggest!! Thanks in advance!

@Hichamov: Yes..but it shows junks in Windows and Linux both.. :( — NDeveloper, Mar 18 '14 at 09:49
Seems like the linux environnement needs the lang packages for french — Hichamov, Mar 18 '14 at 09:49
I am not sure but once I was told its a problem related to Windows — Hichamov, Mar 18 '14 at 09:50
@Hichamov that does not matter; the JDK comes with its own encoding mappings — fge, Mar 18 '14 at 09:50
@NDeveloper when you print the content before writing it to a file, does it appear OK? — fge, Mar 18 '14 at 09:51
At the time I was doing Android developpement and was told that the problem is from the windows char formats in the csv, but maybe I am wrong — Hichamov, Mar 18 '14 at 09:51
Can you show input and your current output? One man's junk may be another man's Clew. — Jongware, Mar 18 '14 at 09:53
@NDeveloper, Is your Java version 7, how could u fic this issue please? I too face the same issue. Thanks in advance — Alagammal P, Oct 12 '17 at 20:09

fge · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18T10:01:02.253

Hypothesis: you use Excel to open your CSVs under Windows.

Unfortunately for you, Excel is crap at reading UTF-8. Even though it should not be required, Excel expects to have a byte order mark at the beginning of the CSV if it uses any UTF-* encoding, otherwise it will try and read it using Windows 1252!

Solution? Errr... Don't use Excel?

Anyway, with your old way:

CSVWriter writer = new CSVWriter(new FileWriter(file));

this would use the JVM's default encoding; this is windows-1252 under Windows and UTF-8 under Linux.

Note that Apache's commons-io has BOM{Input,Output}Stream classes which may help you here.

Another solution would be (ewwww) to always read/write using Windows-1252.

Other note: if you use Java 7, use the Files.newBuffered{Reader,Writer}() methods -- and the try-with-resources statement.

Exporting CSV in french language shows junk charcters

1 Answers1