In Microsoft Office when saving an Excel file to CSV file, Excel doesn’t ask if we have to care about encoding, in particular, a major problem occur with characters is being replaced with other symbols like square, star etc. Want we want is to save Unicode in UTF-8.
There is a solution, not the prettiest but it works.
- Open your Excel file and press Save As, choose “CSV (Comma Delimited) (*.csv) as the file type.
- In NOTEPAD (found under “Programs” and then Accessories in Start menu), open the saved .csv file in Notepad
- Choose -> Save As… Here at the bottom, you’ll fine the Encoding we were missing.Select UTF-8
- After selecting UTF-8, then save the file
Now the file has the desired encoding UTF-8. Note: in step three you can see the issue as it will say “ANSI” which will lose all the accents.