chinese (UFT-8) in csv files created by a server

[Hugo Scott]

Hi

I have an online application written in PHP that exports database query
reults to a CSV file to be saved on the user's local machine and opened by
Excel

when the output is UTF8 encoded and the CSV file is opened in notepad all
the French accented charcaters and Chinese characters display fine.

However, when i open the same file in Excel French accented charcaters and
Chinese characters are wrong

If I change the output encoding to latin, then the French characters display
fine in Excel but not the Chinese ones.

I tried opening a new Excel sheet, pasting in some chinese and saving it as
csv format but the chinese just displayed as question marks - so this would
seem to suggest that csv just won't accept UTF-8 encoding.

So i turn to you as experts in all things Excel : do you know if csv has
something inherent that will always prevent it from displaying chinese
characters ? Or could there be some way to force the csv to accept this type
of encoding ?

thanks for any help you can give - even if it's just to tell me that what I
want to do can't be done, so that i can find another approach to the problem

thanks

 

[Hugo Scott]

it's ok I've cracked it using xml output to an xls file