Creating Excel-compatible utf8-CSV with io.String

Question

I want to create a CSV string which is being sent by mail. I'd like to avoid temporary files because it's just not necessary for me to deal with the file system. As I said, the data is passed to a mail class.

I found this neat solution

output = io.StringIO()
writer = csv.writer(output, delimiter=';', dialect='excel-tab')
writer.writerows(data)

It works perfectly except that it creates a UTF-8 file which will have messed up special characters if you open it in Excel.

I tried to pass a BOM to the StringIO constructor, but nothing worked:

output = io.StringIO('\ufeff')

I tried to somehow set the encoding to utf-8-sig but I couldn't find a way except using a file...

Any ideas how to solve this problem?

Thanks!

Kevin · Accepted Answer · 2021-05-18 18:58:17Z

1

StringIO is strings which means unicode. To do what you want, I think you need to use BytesIO instead.

After reading this and this I think the problem is that StringIO is strings only and therefore no encoding.

You could try this [extrapolated from the first link above]:

bio = io.BytesIO()
StreamWriter = codecs.getwriter('utf-8-sig')
wrapper_file = StreamWriter(bio)
csv.writer(wrapper_file,...
writer.writerows(data)

Python character encoding makes my head hurt...

answered May 18, 2021 at 18:58

Kevin

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