Python-Django utf-8 csv.writer

Question

im using python csv library for exporting my models into a csv file in django. codes are like this :

import csv
from django.http import HttpResponse

def some_view(request):
    # Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.
    response = HttpResponse(content_type='text/csv')
    response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'

    writer = csv.writer(response)
    writer.writerow(['First row', 'Foo', 'Bar', 'Baz'])
    writer.writerow(['Second row', 'A', 'B', 'C', '"Testing"', "Here's a quote"])

    return response

My problem : in my database i have some persian characters that just works with utf-8 encoding format , so when i open generated csv file in excel the persian characters not shown correctly.

Answer 1

i try encode('UTF-8') Solution in some cases, but the result in microsoft excel is not readable , it shows b'\xd8\xb1\xdb\x8c\xd8'. However i find the correct way for showing CSV in excel readable.

import csv
from django.http import HttpResponse

def some_view(request):
    # Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.
    response = HttpResponse(content_type='text/csv')
    response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'

    response.write(u'\ufeff'.encode('utf8'))
    writer = csv.writer(response)
    writer.writerow(['First row', 'Foo', 'Bar', 'Baz'])
    writer.writerow(['Second row', 'A', 'B', 'C', '"Testing"', "Here's a quote"])

    return response

Just add response.write(u'\ufeff'.encode('utf8')) into the code

Answer 2

just add this new line code :

response.write(codecs.BOM_UTF8)

after this line :

 response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'

Answer 3

use this i have arabic character and worked fine for me

def university_csv(request):
    response = HttpResponse(content_type='text/csv')
    response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="university_list.csv"'
    writer = csv.writer(response)
    university_obj = Universities.objects.using('cms').all()
    writer.writerow(['id', 'NAME', 'ABBREVIATION', 'ADDRESS'])
    for item in university_obj:
        if item.address:
            if item.abbreviation:
                writer.writerow([item.id, item.name.encode('UTF-8'), item.abbreviation.encode('UTF-8'),
                                 item.address.encode('UTF-8')])
            else:
                writer.writerow([item.id, item.name.encode('UTF-8'), item.abbreviation, item.address.encode('UTF-8')])
        else:
            if item.abbreviation:
                writer.writerow([item.id, item.name.encode('UTF-8'), item.abbreviation.encode('UTF-8')])
            else:
                writer.writerow([item.id, item.name.encode('UTF-8')])

    return response

Answer 4

First of all add a:

# coding: utf-8

At the top of your .py file. Second, it's not an Django issue, it's rather the MS Excel issue. I had a similar problem last week and found that in excel when you choose the encoding you just need to set the language code (or something like that) to UTF-8 family rather the Persian.