Export csv file with encoding in MVC controller

Question

I have the following controller action used to export a csv file

public ActionResult ExportExcel(int projectId)
        {
            var risks = new RiskRepository().GetRisksByProjectId(projectId);
            var commaDelimmeted =
                    risks.Select(
                        r => r.RiskDescription + "," + r.RiskTypeId.ToString() + "," + r.Likelihood.ToString() + "," + r.Impact + "," + r.Action + "," + r.ActionBy + ",")
                        .ToList();

            string data = commaDelimmeted.Aggregate(string.Empty, (current, line) => current + line + Environment.NewLine);

            Response.ClearContent();
            Response.Buffer = true;
            // set the header
            var aliasName = "someFile.csv";
            Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + aliasName);
            Response.ContentType = "application/csv";
            Response.Charset = "";
            Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
            Response.Output.Write(data);
            Response.Flush();
            Response.End();

            return File(Response.OutputStream, "application/csv");
        }

The output csv file do not show right to left langauge characters properly, so I've set response content encoding header the problem still exists.

Any thoughts?

Edit : Looking at Darin's solution in this post didn't fix my problem , the output shows System.Byte[] in the csv output file.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:25:22Z

2

Based on this post, it turns out the encoding preamble must be appended to the csv data like this :

using (var sw = System.IO.File.Create(csvPath))
            {
                var preamble = Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble();
                sw.Write(preamble, 0, preamble.Length);
                var databytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);
                sw.Write(databytes, 0, data.Length);
            }

and this did the trick.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:25

CommunityBot

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answered Aug 14, 2016 at 10:46

Voice Of The Rain

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Comments

Văn Tuấn Phạm · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-10 11:00:40Z

0

 Have you tried setting the encoding in a meta tag in the HTML?

 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
   Excel won't see the response headers, so it won't know what the Response.Encoding is. The meta tag allows it to find out.

answered Aug 10, 2016 at 11:00

Văn Tuấn Phạm

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1 Comment

Voice Of The Rain Over a year ago

do you mean that I have to append this to my data string?

PhillipH · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-10 11:09:05Z

0

Unless you absolutely need it to be a CSV file I'd recommend converting it to use ClosedML (available on NuGet) to generate a proper XLSX file - you can then use the GetMimeMapping function and return a FileStreamResult.

answered Aug 10, 2016 at 11:09

PhillipH

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