Wierd binary-string for values in CSV-file (import in Laravel containing danish æ, ø and å-letters)

Question

I have a file that has the Mime-type: text/csv.

I want to iterate through it and make a bunch of string-manipulation.

I have a billion columns and rows. But a simple example:

Foo    Bar    Grød
------------------
1      2      3
4      5      6

If I just print the values out, straight away, without having done anything, then Laravel prints this (for the headers):

My code:

foreach( $headers as $entry ){
  dump( $entry );
}

Output

Foo
Bar
b"Grød"

Now that third line is the problem. It's a binary-string

But I want 'what's inside the b" and ". So I want an output like this:

Foo
Bar
Grød

If I just add utf8_decode, like this:

foreach( $headers as $entry ){
  dump( utf8_decode( $entry ) );
}

Foo
Bar
Gr?d

?!

How do I get the actual values from all rows that contains the danish æ, ø and å letters? It's a part of the standard UTF-8-encoding, so it should be rocket science.

Addition1

If I write: dd( $request['csv_file'] ), then it outputs this:

-test: false
-originalName: "FILENAME.csv"
-mimeType: "text/csv"
-error: 0
#hashName: null
path: "/private/var/folders/hl/r1syq9ys4z30lw08b6g8hhnh0000gn/T"
filename: "phpzYwY9I"
basename: "phpzYwY9I"
pathname: "/private/var/folders/hl/r1syq9ys4z30lw08b6g8hhnh0000gn/T/phpzYwY9I"
extension: ""
realPath: "/private/var/folders/hl/r1syq9ys4z30lw08b6g8hhnh0000gn/T/phpzYwY9I"
aTime: 2019-02-20 15:31:10
mTime: 2019-02-20 15:31:10
cTime: 2019-02-20 15:31:10
inode: 12891860254
size: 2282762
perms: 0100600
owner: 501
group: 20
type: "file"
writable: true
readable: true
executable: false
file: true
dir: false
link: false

I don't know if it's any help to anyone.

And if I (in the terminal) write file -I FILENAME.csv then it outputs: FILENAME.csv: application/octet-stream; charset=binary

The b"" is only a convention of that dump utility. There's no difference as far as PHP is concerned, PHP doesn't have anything called "binary strings". There's nothing really at all you need to do. If you want to figure out what the actual encoding of the string is, use bin2hex to look at its actual byte representation. — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 13:51
Interesting. Later on in the code, I do a 'in_array( 'Grød', $headers );` and that's the one that fails. And it fails regardsless if I do a utf8_decode or not. So there must be something with that crappy letter! :-) — Zeth
– Zeth, Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 14:16
Stupid question, where are you dumping that value? Do you see Gr?d this in browser or somewhere else? — skywalker
– skywalker, Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 14:24
In the browser, yes. So I write dump( .... ) and reload the page (in the browser). — Zeth
– Zeth, Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 14:28
If in_array doesn't find it, that means the encoding of the string in your PHP file (i.e., the encoding of the PHP file), and the encoding of the strings in the array are different. — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Feb 20, 2019 at 14:31

dparoli · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-20 14:23:01Z

1

Try to change the encoding of the file to UTF-8. For conversion you could use a text editor like Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Convert the file to UTF-8 or better to UTF with BOM, save it and retry.

I suppose that, because of some character present in the file, php thinks that the file is encoded in an other charset (not UTF-8), or the file is really encoded in an other charset because of your database encoding or the way you got this csv file.

edited Feb 20, 2019 at 14:23

answered Feb 20, 2019 at 14:11

dparoli

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3 Comments

Zeth Over a year ago

Didn't work. :-/ If I (in the terminal) write: file -I FILENAME.csv then it outputs: FILENAME.csv: application/octet-stream; charset=binary. Perhaps that tells someone something.

dparoli Over a year ago

try to convert to UTF8 with BOM

Zeth Over a year ago

If I save using UTF8 with BOM, then it outputs: ?Grød. :-/

Zeth · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-20 14:44:21Z

0

This solved it for me. Using unpack( "a*", $entry );.

Thanks for your time everybody! Every little thing helped.

answered Feb 20, 2019 at 14:44

Zeth

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1 Comment

deceze Over a year ago

I'd again advise to see what you're actually dealing with using bin2hex() before applying such mystery solutions.

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