Character Encoding Issues in CSV Files

Issue

When opening a CSV file in Excel, some special characters may appear garbled or display as unexpected symbols.

For example, characters such as curly apostrophes, quotation marks, accented letters, or other non-standard text may appear incorrectly after the file is opened in Excel.

E.X: Mother’s Room à Mother’s Room 

The same file may appear correctly when opened in Notepad or another text editor.

Cause

This is typically caused by a character encoding mismatch.

Many CSV files are saved using UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 supports a wide range of special characters, including curly apostrophes, accented characters, and other Unicode symbols.

However, when Excel opens a CSV file directly, especially by double-clicking the file, it may try to read the file using a legacy Windows encoding such as Windows-1252 / ANSI instead of UTF-8.

When this happens, Excel interprets the UTF-8 byte sequence incorrectly and displays the characters as garbled text. This type of garbled text is commonly referred to as mojibake.

Resolution

To open the CSV file correctly in Excel, import the file instead of opening it by double-clicking.

1. Open Excel.
2. Go to Data → From Text/CSV.
3. Select the CSV file.
4. In the import preview, choose File Origin / Encoding: UTF-8.
5. Click Load.

Alternative Resolution

The file can also be saved or exported as UTF-8 with BOM.

Excel is more likely to detect UTF-8 correctly when the file includes a UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of the file.

Additional Notes

This issue is not caused by the text editor displaying the file incorrectly. It is caused by Excel selecting the wrong encoding when opening or importing the file.

When working with CSV files that contain special characters, accented characters, or smart punctuation, use UTF-8 encoding whenever possible.