Forums

Hi,

I'm having some issues with the charset when I export to Excel.

The å ä ö letters in the swedish alphabet are showing up very strange. Both in the filename and inside the excel file in the data fields.

I can use a function to replace the wierd stuff with the proper letters but it's not only å ä ö, it's also é ú and some more.

Any suggestions?

Adam<br><br>Post edited by: AdamG, at: 2008/04/10 03:05

Hi Adam,

this happens in both the Excel and the CSV ?

Cheers

Max

Hi Max,

As always, a quick answer from you guys!

Yes, thats correct. The CSV-file is also wierd.

Adam

Excel can't read a UTF-8 encoded CSV or XLS file. If your site is in UTF-8, then that's the problem.

EDIT: Sorry

Yes, that is the problem!<br><br>Post edited by: AdamG, at: 2008/04/10 03:03

Hi Adam,

Try to add thisl ine after the other header lines in admin.chronocontact.php :

header('Content-Type: text/xml, charset=UTF-8; encoding=UTF-8');

Hi Max,

I tried that, It didn't work. I even put it in excelwriter/Writer.php and I even changed the values in excelwriter/writer/worksheet.php from UTF-16E to UTF-8.

Didn't work.

So, me being a debugger, I tried to put in hardcoded letters and it did work with those ones, but the database letters (in the same sheet) are still looking strange. Maybe there is something wrong there? Is there a charset convert function available that I can use on the database rows?

Best regards
Adam

Hi Adam,

Sure, whats the charset setting used to store the DB data ? can you see the swedish characters fine on the "view saved data" page ?

Max

Hi Max,

It's UTF-8 I think. Im not sure.

But yes I can view the data fine. Everything else in joomla that comes from the database works fine. It's just the export to CSV and Excel that dosen't work.

Adam

Hi Adam,

It seems that the export code will need some hacks because excel is not supporting the UTF-8, please check this page for some hints :
http://www.weberdev.com/get_example-3701.html

Also lets do this test, go to your PHPmyadmin and export the table data to CSV or Excel 2000 files and check, can you get the data fine with this export ?

Let me know!

Regards,

Max

Hi Max,

That wasn't correct, but it was very helpful.

The issue is solved!
I just typed this in front of the database sting. Replace $text with $database string and ISO-8859-1 to your local charset)

mb_convert_encoding($text, 'ISO-8859-1');

It works perfectly fine!

Thank you Max.

Adam

Hi Adam,

Very cool, Glad you got it fixed now!

If you can add some lines of code before and after the line above to show where the line was inserted exactly and mention the file name and function name may be, this will be very helpful in case any body got the same problem in the future and read this post!

Thanks!

Max

Hi,

I would be happy to help!

On line 683 under the function BackupExcel, in the admin.chronocontact.php file. Replace this line:

$formname = $database->loadResult();

With this:

$formname = mb_convert_encoding($database->loadResult(), 
  'ISO-8859-1');

And on line 712 in the same function and file. Replace this line:

$sheet->writeString($rowcount, $datacol, 
  $datarow->$table_field, 0);

With this:

$sheet->writeString($rowcount, $datacol, 
  mb_convert_encoding($datarow->$table_field, 'ISO-8859-1'), 0);

Remember to change ISO-8859-1 to your country charset.

Best Regards
Adam

Thanks Adam!!

Best regards

Max

I'm with the same problem.
I've tried to modify the two lines as Adam said, but it didn't solve the problem.

Please I really need the solution. What else should I do besides changing these two lines? Did I anything?

Adam, thanks for all the help
Developers, thanks for this extension. It certainly is a must have one.

Hi Julio,

Adam's fix was badly displayed here because of some forum coding problems. It's fixed now - > replaced by > - please check you have the correct code in your files.

Bob

Hi Julio,

this thread might also be relevant.

Bob

Hi Bob, thanks again!

I noticed that > was replaced by - > and have writen the right sign.

I have not done the fixes mentioned in the thread you told me. I think it was about a column problem in mac computers, isn’t it? I don’t have this problem.

My chronoforms wasn't the last version. I've installed the last one and changed the lines. No success again.

I found a solution to my problem!!!!!
Actually I found a way to make Excel open in UTF-8 format.

My excel is in Portuguese. I will try to translate it to English. I use Excel 2007, there's a similar way to use my solution on other versions of excel.

1- On Excel 2007, select the fourth tab: "data"
2- Select the third option: "from text"
3- In the new window that appears select the archive that was exported by chronoforms, and click Import
5- Select Delimited and "65001: Unicode (UTF-8)", then click next
6- Select comma as delimiter. Select " symbol as text qualifier, then click next
7- If you want, select the type of data (text, number, etc.) of each column, then click finish
8- Select the cell or the new sheet you want to put the entries, then click OK

That's all folks.
Please I ask someone to explain the process in correct English.
My Excel is in Portuguese, I tried to translate the process to English.

Hope it is useful to users. What about putting this at FAQ section?

I must thank Bob, Max, Adam, all developers and this forum for all the help. The support of chrono developers is really OUTSTANDING!!!!

I was just about to ask you what charset you were using.

Im glad that it worked out for you.

And that is true, the support here is truly outstanding.

Regards, Adam

THX Julio

Remember to change ISO-8859-1 to your country charset.

Adam, what do you mean by this?

I am in the UK, but we have taken registrations through the site and now have these character problems with swedish, latvian, german names and addresses.... possibly more also.

So which country charset should I change your code to?

I think the problem goes further for me unfortunatly.

If I go into phpmyadmin and export the table, and then open it in textedit or excel 2004, I get the same issue, so the problem looks to be generated upon capture, rather than the export function to excel.

Does anyone else have these issues. This may explain why none of the mentioned fixes in this forum worked for me.

I have german, latvian, swedish and other european characters being captured. Is there something I can do to my forms to help with this problem?