fgetcsv() ignores special characters when they are at the beginning of line!

Question

I have a simple script that accepts a CSV file and reads every row into an array. I then cycle through each column of the first row (in my case it holds the questions of a survey) and I print them out. The survey is in french and whenever the first character of a question is a special character (é,ê,ç, etc) fgetcsv simply omits it.

Special characters in the middle of the value are not affected only when they are the first character.

I tried to debug this but I am baffled. I did a var_dump with the content of the file and the characters are definitely there:

var_dump(utf8_encode(file_get_contents($_FILES['csv_file']['tmp_name'])));

And here's my code:

if(file_exists($_FILES['csv_file']['tmp_name']) && $csv = fopen($_FILES['csv_file']['tmp_name'], "r"))
    {
        $csv_arr = array();

        //Populate an array with all the cells of the CSV file
        while(!feof($csv))
        {
            $csv_arr[] = fgetcsv($csv);
        }

        //Close the file, no longer needed
        fclose($csv);

        // This should cycle through the cells of the first row (questions)
        foreach($csv_arr[0] as $question)
        {
            echo utf8_encode($question) . "<br />";
        }

    }

Answer 1

Are you setting your locale correctly before calling fgetcsv()?

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR.UTF-8');

Otherwise, fgetcsv() is not multi-byte safe.

Make sure that you set it to something that appears in your list of available locales. On linux (certainly on debian) you can see this by doing

locale -a

You should get something like...

C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

For UTF8 support pick an encoding with utf8 on the end. If your input is encoded with something else you'll need to use the appropriate locale - but make sure your OS supports it first.

If you set the locale to a locale which isn't available on your system it won't help you.

Answer 2

This behaviour has a bug report filed for it, but apparently it isn't a bug.