Using Excel to view CSV file created in PHP

I am looking for a way to open a CSV file, that was created with a PHP script, in Excel - in such a way that Excel knows how to parse the file. Currently when i double click on a CSV file created with PHP, Excel opens the content in a single column so开发者_开发技巧 it does not parse each line. Also, if i do CTRL-O in Excel and select the CSV file to be opened, Excel launches a wizard where i am able to select parsing and encoding option.

Are there any 'headers' or flag characters that i could prepend to the CSV output in PHP to let Excel know how to open a file? I know, for example, that in order for Excel to handle UTF8 encoding, a U+FEFF character needs to be included as the first character in the CSV file, so maybe there is something similar for parsing?

Thanks.

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Beware that depending on your xcel version you will or will not have the csv options dialog in Excel when opening direclty the csv file.

latest versions of Excel I've tested needs a special menu usage to get this dialog. So you should provides what Excels wants. And what he wants is a tab-separated csv (not comas, funny enough when he save a csv file he use comas but not in his auto-import), without " and without carriage returns in cells, and not in utf8.

Some says he need some sort of UTF16, I can't remember exactly, certainly the UTF-32LE BOM cited by Mark Baker. You will certainly have to transcode your chars.

Then do not forget to set tes text/csv mime type header.

When I see this broken auto-import csv without dialog of the new Excel I wonder if they didn't want to avoid complelty csv usage :-)

Ho, and I saw somewhere in past that there some mysterious formating commands you can use in an pure HTML table export that Excel will understand really better than the csv format. You should search a lttle about it, maybe really simplier.