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Weird characters when parsing CSV in PHP

Filed under: web 2.0 — Tags: coding, php — taewoo @ 7:37 pm February 2, 2010

For some reason, if you do this PHP

$csv_file = file_get_contents(site_url($file_name));
$csv_lines = explode(”n”, $csv_file);

a CSV line like this

Campaign Name Ad Group Name Component Type …

turns into a weird line like this:

377376C^@a^@m^@p^@a^@i^@g^@n ^@N…

This has to do with PHP’s character encoding issues.

Here’s the easier way to take care of this problem:

$csv1 = file($csv_file);
$csv2 = implode($csv1);
$csv3 = iconv(”UTF-16″,”ISO-8859-1″,$csv2);
$csv = explode (”n”,$csv3);

This will solve that character issue.