exporting from DB to CSV - encoding issues with arabic characters

[datrader]

I’m trying to export from DB content that includes Arabic letters.
When I export to CSV/XLS it appears as ???????? or الØGAYمراوي
I use this code:

$query = "SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci'";
mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());


function CSVExport($query,$filename = 'data') {
    $sql_csv = mysql_query($query) or die("Error: " . mysql_error()); 
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
    //header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
    header("Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate");
    header("Pragma: public"); 
    header("Content-type:text/octect-stream");
    header("Content-Disposition:attachment;filename=$filename.csv");
    
    while($row = mysql_fetch_row($sql_csv)) {
        print '"' . stripslashes(implode('","',$row)) . "\"\n";
    }
    exit;
}


 CSVExport("SELECT * from `arabictable`", 'myexportfile');

Anyone has idea how do I fix this? How do I see Arabic letters correctly?

 

[mattseh]

Try taking out the headers, print it as a normal webpage, then wget that page and look at it in a normal text editor, is it still screwed up? Then it's how you interact with the database probably. If not, it's probably your spreadsheet app.

 

[Kiopa_Matt]

What's the character set of your database? latin1 or utf-8? If latin1 (default upon mySQL install), you're fucked, and those arabic characters are gone, as they wouldn't be stored properly. You'll need to recreate the tables under utf-8, and re-import the arabic rows / characters.

If it's currently latin1, and that database is the only copy of the data you have, then there's not much you can do. You'll just have to accept it as a data loss.