Generate CSV for Excel via JavaScript with Unicode Characters

Question

I am trying to generate a CSV file on the client side using javascript. I've followed the answer on this stackoverflow question. I have unicode characters in the content (Hebrew characters in my case).

The file generation succeeds, however when I open the file in Excel - all the unicode characters are shown as funny characters. ASCII characters (English and numbers) are presented well.

The weird thing is that if I open the file in notepad, the unicode characters show well. So I guess this has something to do with Excel and the way I'm saving the file.

Any ideas?

It could be the Byte Order Mark. Does this link help? stackoverflow.com/questions/155097/… — Jack Cole
– Jack Cole, Commented Aug 15, 2013 at 9:48

Mosh Feu · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-02 20:32:25Z

41

Following Jack Cole's comment and this question, what fixed my problem was adding a BOM prefix (\uFEFF) to the beginning of the file.

This is the working code:

var csvContent = "...csv content...";
var encodedUri = encodeURI(csvContent);
var link = document.createElement("a");
link.setAttribute("href", "data:text/csv;charset=utf-8,\uFEFF" + encodedUri);
link.setAttribute("download","report.csv");
link.click();

edited Jan 2, 2019 at 20:32

Mosh Feu

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answered Aug 15, 2013 at 10:57

Shay Friedman

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ghiscoding · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-08 13:39:39Z

6

The suggested solution didn't work with all browsers, but I found a way to get it working in all of them (Chrome, Firefox, IE11 and even Edge, ... don't know about IE9-10 since I don't have access to them anymore).

I have to use an external library to encode encoding.js or you could also use text-encoding-utf-8 and it works amazingly well with unicode (I can see my unicorn emoji in my CSV export in Excel).

So here's the code

data = new TextEncoder('utf-16be').encode(csvContent);
  
// create a Blob object for the download
const blob = new Blob(['\uFEFF', data], {
  type: 'text/csv;charset=utf-8';
});

// if we're using IE/Edge, then use different download call
if (typeof navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob === 'function') {
  navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(blob, filename);
} else {
  // the next code will generate a temp <a /> tag that you can trigger a hidden click for it to start downloading
  const link = document.createElement('a');
  const csvUrl = URL.createObjectURL(blob);

  link.textContent = 'download';
  link.href = csvUrl;
  link.setAttribute('download', filename);

  // set the visibility hidden so that there is no effect on your web-layout
  link.style.visibility = 'hidden';

  // finally we will append the anchor tag and remove it after clicking it
  document.body.appendChild(link);
  link.click();
  document.body.removeChild(link);
}

and that's it, it works in IE / Edge / Chrome / Firefox

edited Sep 8 at 13:39

answered Feb 16, 2018 at 0:25

ghiscoding

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3 Comments

balexandre Over a year ago

"...I don't have access to them anymore" --> developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms

Dulara Malindu Sep 3 at 11:01

@ghiscoding, That text encoding library that you referred to is no longer maintained. can you recommend something else?

ghiscoding Sep 8 at 13:43

no longer maintained doesn't mean it stopped working, it still has millions of download every month. But anyway, in my case I switched to text-encoding-utf-8 which also hasn't received any updates in 8 years, it works great for me nonetheless.

Gaʀʀʏ · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-08 16:54:43Z

3

On a Node/Express server, I tried Shay's answer but I was getting an error for invalid characters in my header. Instead, I added the \uFEFF to the beginning of the reply body and it worked.

app.get('/', function (req, res) {
    var csv = Papa.unparse(...);
    res.set({
       'Content-Type': 'text/csv; charset=UTF-8',
       'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename="file.csv"',
    });
    res.send('\uFEFF' + csv)
})

answered Dec 8, 2016 at 16:54

Gaʀʀʏ

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