I'm developing a part of an application that's responsible for exporting some data into CSV files. The application always uses UTF-8 because of its multilingual nature at all levels. But opening such CSV files (containing e.g. diacritics, cyrillic letters, Greek letters) in Excel does not achieve the expected results showing something like Г„/Г¤, Г–/Г¶. And I don't know how to force Excel understand that the open CSV file is encoded in UTF-8. I also tried specifying UTF-8 BOM EF BB BF, but Excel ignores that.
Is there any workaround?
P.S. Which tools may potentially behave like Excel does?
UPDATE
I have to say that I've confused the community with the formulation of the question. When I was asking this question, I asked for a way of opening a UTF-8 CSV file in Excel without any problems for a user, in a fluent and transparent way. However, I used a wrong formulation asking for doing it automatically. That is very confusing and it clashes with VBA macro automation. There are two answers for this questions that I appreciate the most: the very first answer by Alex https://stackoverflow.com/a/6002338/166589, and I've accepted this answer; and the second one by Mark https://stackoverflow.com/a/6488070/166589 that have appeared a little later. From the usability point of view, Excel seemed to have lack of a good user-friendly UTF-8 CSV support, so I consider both answers are correct, and I have accepted Alex's answer first because it really stated that Excel was not able to do that transparently. That is what I confused with automatically here. Mark's answer promotes a more complicated way for more advanced users to achieve the expected result. Both answers are great, but Alex's one fits my not clearly specified question a little better.
UPDATE 2
Five months later after the last edit, I've noticed that Alex's answer has disappeared for some reason. I really hope it wasn't a technical issue and I hope there is no more discussion on which answer is greater now. So I'm accepting Mark's answer as the best one.
Alex is correct, but as you have to export to csv, you can give the users this advice when opening the csv files:
Save the exported file as a csv
Open Excel
Import the data using Data-->Import External Data --> Import Data
Select the file type of "csv" and browse to your file
In the import wizard change the File_Origin to "65001 UTF" (or choose correct language character identifier)
Change the Delimiter to comma
Select where to import to and Finish
This way the special characters should show correctly.
The UTF-8 Byte-order mark will clue Excel 2007+ in to the fact that you're using UTF-8. (See this SO post).
In case anybody is having the same issues I was, .NET's UTF8 encoding class does not output a byte-order marker in a GetBytes() call. You need to use streams (or use a workaround) to get the BOM to output.
The bug with ignored BOM seems to be fixed for Excel 2013. I had same problem with Cyrillic letters, but adding BOM character \uFEFF did help.
It is incredible that there are so many answers but none answers the question:
"When I was asking this question, I asked for a way of opening a UTF-8
CSV file in Excel without any problems for a user,..."
The answer marked as the accepted answer with 200+ up-votes is useless for me because I don't want to give my users a manual how to configure Excel.
Apart from that: this manual will apply to one Excel version but other Excel versions have different menus and configuration dialogs. You would need a manual for each Excel version.
So the question is how to make Excel show UTF8 data with a simple double click?
Well at least in Excel 2007 this is not possible if you use CSV files because the UTF8 BOM is ignored and you will see only garbage. This is already part of the question of Lyubomyr Shaydariv:
"I also tried specifying UTF-8 BOM EF BB BF, but Excel ignores that."
I make the same experience: Writing russian or greek data into a UTF8 CSV file with BOM results in garbage in Excel:
Content of UTF8 CSV file:
Colum1;Column2
Val1;Val2
Авиабилет;Tλληνικ
Result in Excel 2007:
A solution is to not use CSV at all. This format is implemented so stupidly by Microsoft that it depends on the region settings in control panel if comma or semicolon is used as separator. So the same CSV file may open correctly on one computer but on anther computer not. "CSV" means "Comma Separated Values" but for example on a german Windows by default semicolon must be used as separator while comma does not work. (Here it should be named SSV = Semicolon Separated Values) CSV files cannot be interchanged between different language versions of Windows. This is an additional problem to the UTF-8 problem.
Excel exists since decades. It is a shame that Microsoft was not able to implement such a basic thing as CSV import in all these years.
However, if you put the same values into a HTML file and save that file as UTF8 file with BOM with the file extension XLS you will get the correct result.
Content of UTF8 XLS file:
<table>
<tr><td>Colum1</td><td>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Авиабилет</td><td>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
Result in Excel 2007:
You can even use colors in HTML which Excel will show correctly.
<style>
.Head { background-color:gray; color:white; }
.Red { color:red; }
</style>
<table border=1>
<tr><td class=Head>Colum1</td><td class=Head>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td class=Red>Авиабилет</td><td class=Red>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
Result in Excel 2007:
In this case only the table itself has a black border and lines. If you want ALL cells to display gridlines this is also possible in HTML:
<html xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/plain; charset=UTF-8"/>
<xml>
<x:ExcelWorkbook>
<x:ExcelWorksheets>
<x:ExcelWorksheet>
<x:Name>MySuperSheet</x:Name>
<x:WorksheetOptions>
<x:DisplayGridlines/>
</x:WorksheetOptions>
</x:ExcelWorksheet>
</x:ExcelWorksheets>
</x:ExcelWorkbook>
</xml>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr><td>Colum1</td><td>Column2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Val1</td><td>Val2</td></tr>
<tr><td>Авиабилет</td><td>Tλληνικ</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
This code even allows to specify the name of the worksheet (here "MySuperSheet")
Result in Excel 2007:
We have used this workaround:
Convert CSV to UTF-16 LE
Insert BOM at beginning of file
Use tab as field separator
Had the same problems with PHP-generated CSV files.
Excel ignored the BOM when the Separator was defined via "sep=,\n" at the beginning of the content (but of course after the BOM).
So adding a BOM ("\xEF\xBB\xBF") at the beginning of the content and setting the semicolon as separator via fputcsv($fh, $data_array, ";"); does the trick.
You can convert .csv file to UTF-8 with BOM via Notepad++:
Open the file in Notepad++.
Go to menu Encoding→Convert to UTF-8-BOM.
Go to menu File→Save.
Close Notepad++.
Open the file in Excel .
Worked in Microsoft Excel 2013 (15.0.5093.1000) MSO (15.0.5101.1000) 64-bit from Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 on Windows 8.1 with locale for non-Unicode programs set to "German (Germany)".
Old question but heck, the simplest solution is:
Open CSV in Notepad
Save As -> select the right encoding
Open the new file
I have had the same issue in the past (how to produce files that Excel can read, and other tools can also read). I was using TSV rather than CSV, but the same problem with encodings came up.
I failed to find any way to get Excel to recognize UTF-8 automatically, and I was not willing/able to inflict on the consumers of the files complicated instructions how to open them. So I encoded them as UTF-16le (with a BOM) instead of UTF-8. Twice the size, but Excel can recognize the encoding. And they compress well, so the size rarely (but sadly not never) matters.
As I posted on http://thinkinginsoftware.blogspot.com/2017/12/correctly-generate-csv-that-excel-can.html:
Tell the software developer in charge of generating the CSV to correct it. As a quick workaround you can use gsed to insert the UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of the string:
gsed -i '1s/^\(\xef\xbb\xbf\)\?/\xef\xbb\xbf/' file.csv
This command inserts the UTF-4 BOM if not present. Therefore it is an idempotent command. Now you should be able to double click the file and open it in Excel.
In php you just prepend $bom to your $csv_string:
$bom = sprintf( "%c%c%c", 239, 187, 191); // EF BB BF
file_put_contents( $file_name, $bom . $csv_string );
Tested with MS Excel 2016, php 7.2.4
Simple vba macro for opening utf-8 text and csv files
Sub OpenTextFile()
filetoopen = Application.GetOpenFilename("Text Files (*.txt;*.csv), *.txt;*.csv")
If filetoopen = Null Or filetoopen = Empty Then Exit Sub
Workbooks.OpenText Filename:=filetoopen, _
Origin:=65001, DataType:=xlDelimited, Comma:=True
End Sub
Origin:=65001 is UTF-8.
Comma:True for .csv files distributed in colums
Save it in Personal.xlsb to have it always available.
Personalise excel toolbar adding a macro call button and open files from there.
You can add more formating to the macro, like column autofit , alignment,etc.
Just for help users interested on opening the file on Excel that achieve this thread like me.
I have used the wizard below and it worked fine for me, importing an UTF-8 file.
Not transparent, but useful if you already have the file.
Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
Click on the Data menu bar option.
Click on the From Text icon.
Navigate to the location of the file that you want to import. Click on the filename and then click on the Import button. The Text Import Wizard - Step 1 or 3 window will now appear on the screen.
Choose the file type that best describes your data - Delimited or Fixed Width.
Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list that appears next to File origin.
Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 or 3 window.
Place a checkmark next to the delimiter that was used in the file you wish to import into Microsoft Excel 2007. The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear based on the delimiter that you chose.
Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard - Step 3 of 3.
Choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import. You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want.
Click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel 2007.
Source: https://www.itg.ias.edu/content/how-import-csv-file-uses-utf-8-character-encoding-0
A truly amazing list of answers, but since one pretty good one is still missing, I'll mention it here: open the csv file with google sheets and save it back to your local computer as an excel file.
In contrast to Microsoft, Google has managed to support UTF-8 csv files so it just works to open the file there. And the export to excel format also just works. So even though this may not be the preferred solution for all, it is pretty fail safe and the number of clicks is not as high as it may sound, especially when you're already logged into google anyway.
This is my working solution:
vbFILEOPEN = "your_utf8_file.csv"
Workbooks.OpenText Filename:=vbFILEOPEN, DataType:=xlDelimited, Semicolon:=True, Local:=True, Origin:=65001
The key is Origin:=65001
Yes it is possible. When writing the stream creating the csv, the first thing to do is this:
myStream.Write(Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble(), 0, Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble().Length)
Yes, this is possible. As previously noted by multiple users, there seems to be a problem with excel reading the correct Byte Order Mark when the file is encoded in UTF-8. With UTF-16 it does not seem to have a problem, so it is endemic to UTF-8. The solution I use for this is adding the BOM, TWICE. For this I execute the following sed command twice:
sed -I '1s/^/\xef\xbb\xbf/' *.csv
, where the wildcard can be replaced with any file name. However, this leads to a mutation of the sep= at the beginning of the .csv file. The .csv file will then open normally in excel, but with an extra row with "sep=" in the first cell.
The "sep=" can also be removed in the source .csv itself, but when opening the file with VBA the delimiter should be specified:
Workbooks.Open(name, Format:=6, Delimiter:=";", Local:=True)
Format 6 is the .csv format. Set Local to true, in case there are dates in the file. If Local is not set to true the dates will be Americanized, which in some cases will corrupt the .csv format.
This is not accurately addressing the question but since i stumbled across this and the above solutions didn't work for me or had requirements i couldn't meet, here is another way to add the BOM when you have access to vim:
vim -e -s +"set bomb|set encoding=utf-8|wq" filename.csv
hi i'm using ruby on rails for csv generation. In our application we plan to go for the multi language(I18n) and we faced an issue while viewing I18n content in the CSV file of windows excel.
Was fine with Linux (Ubuntu) and mac.
We identified that windows excel need to be imported the data again to view the actual data. While import we will get more options to choose character set.
But this can’t be educated for each and every user, so solution we looking for is to open just by double click.
Then we identified the way of showing data by open mode and bom in windows excel with the help of aghuddleston gist. Added at reference.
Example I18n content
In Mac and Linux
Swedish : Förnamn
English : First name
In Windows
Swedish : Förnamn
English : First name
def user_information_report(report_file_path, user_id)
user = User.find(user_id)
I18n.locale = user.current_lang
open_mode = "w+:UTF-16LE:UTF-8"
bom = "\xEF\xBB\xBF"
body user, open_mode, bom
end
def headers
headers = [
"ID", "SDN ID",
I18n.t('sys_first_name'), I18n.t('sys_last_name'), I18n.t('sys_dob'),
I18n.t('sys_gender'), I18n.t('sys_email'), I18n.t('sys_address'),
I18n.t('sys_city'), I18n.t('sys_state'), I18n.t('sys_zip'),
I18n.t('sys_phone_number')
]
end
def body tenant, open_mode, bom
File.open(report_file_path, open_mode) do |f|
csv_file = CSV.generate(col_sep: "\t") do |csv|
csv << headers
tenant.patients.find_each(batch_size: 10) do |patient|
csv << [
patient.id, patient.patientid,
patient.first_name, patient.last_name, "#{patient.dob}",
"#{translate_gender(patient.gender)}", patient.email, "#{patient.address_1.to_s} #{patient.address_2.to_s}",
"#{patient.city}", "#{patient.state}", "#{patient.zip}",
"#{patient.phone_number}"
]
end
end
f.write bom
f.write(csv_file)
end
end
Important things to note here is open mode and bom
open_mode = "w+:UTF-16LE:UTF-8"
bom = "\xEF\xBB\xBF"
Before writing the CSV insert BOM
f.write bom
f.write(csv_file)
Windows and Mac
File can be opened directly by double clicking.
Linux (ubuntu)
While opening a file ask for the separator options -> choose “TAB”
Download & install LibreOffice Calc
Open the csv file of your choice in LibreOffice Calc
Thank the heavens that an import text wizard shows up...
...select your delimiter and character encoding options
Select the resulting data in Calc and copy paste to Excel
I faced the same problem a few days ago, and could not find any solution because I cannot use the import from csv feature because it makes everything to be styled as string.
My solution was to first open the file with notpad++ and change the encode to ASCII.
Then just opened the file in excel and it worked as expected.
Working solution for office 365
save in UTF-16 (no LE, BE)
use separator \t
Code in PHP
$header = ['číslo', 'vytvořeno', 'ěščřžýáíé'];
$fileName = 'excel365.csv';
$fp = fopen($fileName, 'w');
fputcsv($fp, $header, "\t");
fclose($fp);
$handle = fopen($fileName, "r");
$contents = fread($handle, filesize($fileName));
$contents = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-16', $contents);
fclose($handle);
$handle = fopen($fileName, "w");
fwrite($handle, $contents);
fclose($handle);
This is an old question but I've just encountered had a similar problem and the solution may help others:
Had the same issue where writing out CSV text data to a file, then opening the resulting .csv in Excel shifts all the text into a single column. After having a read of the above answers I tried the following, which seems to sort the problem out.
Apply an encoding of UTF-8 when you create your StreamWriter. That's it.
Example:
using (StreamWriter output = new StreamWriter(outputFileName, false, Encoding.UTF8, 2 << 22)) {
/* ... do stuff .... */
output.Close();
}
If you want to make it fully automatic, one click, or to load automatically into Excel from say a web page, but can't generate proper Excel files, then I would suggest looking at SYLK format as an alternative. OK it is not as simple as CSV but it is text based and very easy to implement and it supports UTF-8 with no issues.
I wrote a PHP class that receives the data and outputs a SYLK file which will open directly in Excel by just clicking the file (or will auto-launch Excel if you write the file to a web page with the correct mime type. You can even add formatting (like bold, format numbers in particular ways etc) and change column sizes, or auto size columns to the text in the columns and all in all the code is probably not more than about 100 lines.
It is dead easy to reverse engineer SYLK by creating a simple spreadsheet and saving as SYLK and then reading it with a text editor. The first block are headers and standard number formats that you will recognise (which you just regurgitate in every file you create), then the data is simply an X/Y coordinate and a value.
I am generating csv files from a simple C# application and had the same problem. My solution was to ensure the file is written with UTF8 encoding, like so:
// Use UTF8 encoding so that Excel is ok with accents and such.
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(path, false, Encoding.UTF8))
{
SaveCSV(writer);
}
I originally had the following code, with which accents look fine in Notepad++ but were getting mangled in Excel:
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(path))
{
SaveCSV(writer);
}
Your mileage may vary - I'm using .NET 4 and Excel from Office 365.
I tried everything I could find on this thread and similar, nothing worked fully. However, importing to google sheets and simply downloading as csv worked like a charm. Try it out if you come to my frustration point.
It's March 2022, and it seems we cannot use both a BOM and the sep=... line.
Adding the sep=\t or similar, makes Excel ignore the BOM.
Using a semicolon seems to be a default Excel understands, in which case we can skip the sep=... line and it works.
This is Microsoft 365 with Excel version 2110 build 14527.20276.
Found a solution for ASP.NET Core to download CSV's as UTF8 with POM:
byte[] csvBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(csvString);
UTF8Encoding utf8 = new UTF8Encoding(true);
byte[] bom = utf8.GetPreamble();
var result = bom.Concat(csvBytes).ToArray();
return new FileContentResult(result, MediaTypeHeaderValue.Parse("text/csv; charset=utf-8"));
Excel is recognizes the downloaded CSV file than as UTF8.
Just sharing a comprehensive function that might make your life easier working with CSV files.... please note last function argument in relation to this topic
function array2csv($data, $file = '', $download = true, $mode = 'w+', $delimiter = ',', $enclosure = '"', $escape_char = "\\", $addUnicodeBom = false)
{
$return = false;
if ($file == '') {
$f = fopen('php://memory', 'r+');
} else {
$f = fopen($file, $mode);
}
if ($addUnicodeBom) {
$utf8_with_bom = chr(239) . chr(187) . chr(191);
fwrite($f, $utf8_with_bom);
}
foreach ($data as $line => $item) {
fputcsv($f, $item, $delimiter, $enclosure, $escape_char);
}
rewind($f);
if ($download == true) {
$return = stream_get_contents($f);
} else {
$return = true;
}
return $return;
}
First save the Excel spreadsheet as Unicode text. Open the TXT file using Internet explorer and click "Save as" TXT Encoding - choose the appropriate encoding, i.e. for Win Cyrillic 1251
Related
I have to write the output of a database query to a csv file.
Unfortunately, many people in my company are not able to use a nice editor like Notepad++ and keep opening csv files with Excel.
When I write a text/csv file using java.nio like this
public static void main(String[] args) {
Path path = Paths.get("U:\\temp\\TestOutput\\csv_file.csv");
List<String> lines = Arrays.asList("Übernahme", "Außendarstellung", "€", "#", "UTF-8?");
try {
Files.write(path, lines, StandardCharsets.UTF_8, StandardOpenOption.CREATE_NEW);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
the file gets created successfully and is encoded in UTF-8.
Now the problem is the missing BOM in that file.
There is no BOM (Notepad++ bottom-right encoding label shows UTF-8) which is no problem for Notepad++
but obviously it is for Excel
and when I use Notepad++'s option Encoding > Convert to UTF-8-BOM, save & close it and open the file in Excel afterwards, it correctly displays all the values, no encoding issues are left.
That leads to the following question:
Can I force java.nio.file.Files.write(...) to add a BOM when using StandardCharsets.UTF-8 or is there any other way in java.nio to achieve the desired encoding?
As far as I know, there's no direct way in the standard Java NIO library to write text files in UTF-8 with BOM format.
But that's not a problem, since BOM is nothing but a special character at the start of a text stream represented as \uFEFF. Just add it manually to the CSV file, f.e.:
List<String> lines =
Arrays.asList("\uFEFF" + "Übernahme", "Außendarstellung", "€", "#", "UTF-8?");
...
I will suggest instead of using "\uFEFF" + "Übernahme", use as "\uFEFF", "Übernahme".
Benefit of doing this is, it will not change the actual data of the file.
In the case of using opencsv API, you are having the headers in first line and data from second line, then adding "," after BOM character, you can have the same header intact, without any prefix to header. If the header got updated then you have to update the code for the data and header mapping too.
If you are using the properties file for header and data mapping then you have to just add an extra mapping for "\uFEFF" as "\uFEFF"=TEMP there.
this is my first post. I'm new in Java. I'm working on file parser. I've tried to identify if it is CSV or another file format, but it looks like it is not quite a standard format. I'm working on apache camel solution (my first and last idea :( ), but maybe some of you recognize this kind of file format? Additionally, I've got .imp file for my output.
Here is my example input:
NrDok:FS-2222/17/W
Data:12.02.2017
SposobPlatn:GOT
NazwaWystawcy:MAAKAI Gawron
AdresWystawcy:33-123 bABA
KodWystawcy:33-112
MiastoWystawcy:bABA
UlicaWystawcy:czysfa 8
NIPWystawcy:123-19-85-123
NazwaOdbiorcy:abc abc-HANDLOWO-USŁUGOWE
AdresOdbiorcy:33-123 fghd
KodOdbiorcy:33-123
MiastoOdbiorcy:Tdsfs
UlicaOdbiorcy:dfdfdA 39
NIPOdbiorcy:82334349
TelefonOdbiorcy:654-522-124
NrOdbiorcyWSieciSklepow:efdsS-sffgsA
IloscLinii:1
Linia:Nazwa{ĆWIARTKA KG}Kod{C1}Vat{5}Jm{kg.}Asortyment{dfgv}Sww{}PKWIU{10.12.10}Ilosc{3.40}Cena{n3.21}Wartosc{n11.83}IleWOpak{1}CenaSp{b0.00}
DoZaplaty:252.32
And here is my example output file:
FH 2015.07.31 2015.07.31 F04443 Gotowka
FO 812-123-45-11 P.a.b.Uc"fdad" abcd deffF UL.fdfgdfdA 12/33 33-123 afvdf
FS 779-19-06-082 badfdf S.A. ul. Wisniowa 89 60-003 Poznan
FP 00218746 CHRZAN TARTY EXTRA POLONAISE 180G SZT 32.00 2.21 8 10.39.17.0 32.00 5900138000055
Is there any easy way to convert the first file to second file format? Maybe you know the type of this file? In a meanwhile, I'm continuing my work with apache camel.
Thanks in advance for your time and help!
I suggest you to play with https://tika.apache.org/1.1/detection.html#Mime_Magic_Detection
It's very good lib for file type recognition.
Here https://www.tutorialspoint.com/tika/tika_document_type_detection.htm we have simple example.
Your file can be read as standard Java .properties file. This type of files allows both = and : as key and value separators. While the fact that it contains non ISO-8859-1 characters like Polish Ć may prevent Java from correctly parsing it.
This line
Nazwa{ĆWIARTKA KG}Kod{C1}Vat{5}Jm{kg.}Asortyment{dfgv}Sww{}PKWIU{10.12.10}Ilosc{3.40}Cena{n3.21}Wartosc{n11.83}IleWOpak{1}CenaSp{b0.00}
Seem to be some custom serialization format of the object in the form
key1{value1}key2{value2}...
Your output file contains lots of data that is not listed in the input which makes me think that there is some data querying from external systems to build the output. You should investigate it yourself. There is no way anyone can guess the transformation with provided input.
Dear brothers Hope you all right?
I'm designing a document program, however, rather to save file .text extension or using any other MS-Office API in java, i want to create my custom file format such as ".sad" extension so that this sort of file can only be read by my programs, how this can be possible?
Your requirement seems ambiguous. Are you looking to make a program that creates MS Office Word documents or plain text files with a custom file extension?
In the case of the former, you can't have a custom extension as MS Word documents, by definition, have a .doc / .docx extension.
However, if you are looking to create a program that produces text files then you can easily have a custom extension. Just look at this tutorial: How to create a file in Java
I already stated why this is a bad idea. Yet I have a solution for you (more like a how-not-to-do-it)
Take your plain text you want to save, convert it to bytes and apply this "highly enthusiastic encryption nobody will ever be able to break" on it:
string plainText = "yadayada";
bytes[] bytesFromText = toBytes(plainText);
bytes[] encrypted = new Array(sizeof(bytesFromText)*2);
for(int i = 0; i < sizeof(bytesFromText); i++){
if((i modulo 2) == 0){
encrypted.push(toByte(Math.random modulo 255));
}
encrypted.push(bytesFromText[i]);
}
I let it up to you to figure out why this is a bad idea and how to decrypt it. ;)
You can create file with any extension
For example,
File f = new File("confidential.sad");
Hope this will work for you :)
Working with custom files in Java
Here is the tutorial that will help you in getting the concept about how to create your own files with custom extension such as .doc or .sad with some information embedded in it and after saving the file you want to read that information form the file.
ZIP
Similar applications often use archives to store data. Consider MS-Word and its documents >with the .docx file extension. If you change the extension of any .docx file to .zip, you >will find that the document is actually a zip archive, with only a different extension.
https://www.ict.social/java/files/working-with-custom-files-in-java-zip-archive
I have published a library that saves files, and handles everything with one line of code only, you can find it here along with its documentation
Github repository
and the answer to your question is so easy
String path = FileSaver
.get()
.save(file,"file.custom");
We have a requirement of picking the data from Oracle DB table and dump that data into a csv file and a plain pipe seperated text file. Give a link to user on application so user can view the generated csv/text files.
As lot of parsing was involved so we wrote a Unix shell script and are calling it from out Struts/J2ee application.
Earlier we were loosing the Chinese and Roman chars in the generated files and the generated file were having us-ascii charset(cheked using-> file -i). Later we used NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8 and this gave us utf-8 format files.
But still the characters were gibberish, so again we tried iconv command and converted utf-8 files to utf-16le charset.
iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-16le $recordFile > $tempFile
This works fine for the generated text file. But with CSV the Chinese and Roman chars are still not correct. Now if we open this csv file in a Notepad and give a newline by pressing Enter key from keyboard, save it. Open it with MS-Excel, all characters are coming fine including the Chinese and Romans but now the text is in single line for each row instead of columns.
Not sure what's going on.
Java code
PrintWriter out = servletResponse.getWriter();
servletResponse.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=UTF-8");
servletResponse.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
servletResponse.setHeader("Content-Disposition","attachment; filename="+ fileName.toString());
FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(fileLoc + fileName);
int i;
while ((i=fileInputStream.read()) != -1) {
out.write(i);
}
fileInputStream.close();
out.close();
Please let me know if i missed out any details.
Thanks to all for taking out time to go through this.
Was able to solve it out. First as mentioned by Aaron removed UTF-16LE encoding to avoid future issues and encoded files to UTF-8. Changed the PrintWriter in Java code to OutputStream and was able to see the correct characters in my text file.
CSV was still showing garbage. Came to know that we need to prepend EF BB BF at the beginning of file as the BOM aware software like MS-Excel needs it. So changing the Java code as below did the trick for csv.
OutputStream out = servletResponse.getOutputStream();
os.write(239); //0xEF
os.write(187); //0xBB
out.write(191); //0xBF
FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(fileLoc + fileName);
int i;
while ((i=fileInputStream.read()) != -1) {
out.write(i);
}
fileInputStream.close();
out.flush();
out.close();
As always with Unicode problems, every single step of the transformation chain must work perfectly. If you make a mistake in one place, data will be silently corrupted. There is no easy way to figure out where it happens, you have to debug the code or write unit tests.
The Java code above only works if the file actually contains UTF-8 encoded data; it doesn't "magically" figure out what's in the file and converts it to UTF-8. So if the file already contains garbage, you just slap a "this is UTF-8" label on it but it's still garbage.
That means for you that you need to create test cases which take known test data and move that through every step of the chain: Inserting into database, reading from the database, writing to CSV, writing to the text file, reading those files and download to the user.
For each step, you need to write unit tests which takes a known Unicode string like abc öäü and processes it and then check the result. To make it easier to input in Java code, use "abc \u00f6\u00e4\u00fc" You may also want to add spaces at the beginning and end of the string to see whether they are properly preserved or not.
file -i doesn't help you much here since it just makes a guess what the file contains. There is no indicator (data or metadata) in a text file which says "this is UTF-8". UTF-16 supports a BOM header for this but almost no one uses UTF-16, so many tools don't support it (properly).
I'm not looking for a library to convert excel files to pdf, there are plenty of those available. I'm looking for a clean way to convert a spreadsheet with more rows than the width of a page into a pdf.
Can this even be done? I don't consider making the text smaller a valid option because it could feasibly reach an upper limit (i.e. 1 pt font), and there may be enough columns in the spreadsheet to actually reach that limit (~30).
My only idea right now is to make the pages landscape, but is there a way to have the pdf show as "two-up" with both of the pages in landscape and have the proper page ordering underneath to look like a cohesive spreadsheet?
Any other ideas? or suggestions for the idea I have?
Assuming you can read the Excel file (for instance with Apache POI), consider writing to the PDF with Apache FOP using a custom paper size that you define. It may be difficult to print without a roll paper printer, but it will display on the screen just fine.
Have you looked at JasperReports? It has a pretty strong templating engine.
I've never used JasperReports the way you do, but their specialty is dynamic reports so I'd guess they know how to handle page overflows in a nice way.
Here's what I ended up doing. It uses the QuickLook feature on MacOS to make a HTML file, then uses wkhtmltopdf to turn the HTML file into a PDF.
#!/usr/bin/python
#
# convert an excel workbook to a PDF on a Mac
#
#
from subprocess import Popen,call,PIPE
import os, os.path, sys
import xml.dom.minidom
import plistlib
if len(sys.argv)==1:
print("Usage: %s filename.xls output.pdf" % sys.argv[0])
exit(1)
if os.path.exists("xdir"):
raise RuntimeError,"xdir must not exists"
os.mkdir("xdir")
call(['qlmanage','-o','xdir','-p',sys.argv[1]])
# Now we need to find the sheets and sort them.
# This is done by reading the property list
qldir = sys.argv[1] + ".qlpreview"
propfile = open("%s/%s/%s" % ('xdir',qldir,'PreviewProperties.plist'))
plist = plistlib.readPlist(propfile)
attachments = plist['Attachments']
sheets = []
for k in attachments.keys():
if k.endswith(".html"):
basename = os.path.basename(k)
fn = attachments[k]['DumpedAttachmentFileName']
print("Found %s -> %s" % (basename,fn))
sheets.append((basename,fn))
sheets.sort()
# Use wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF output
os.chdir("%s/%s" % ('xdir',qldir))
cmd = ['wkhtmltopdf'];
for (basename,fn) in sheets:
cmd.append(fn)
cmd.append("../../" + sys.argv[2])
try:
call(cmd)
except OSError:
print("\n\nERROR: %s is not installed\n\n" % (cmd[0]))
exit(1)
os.chdir("../..")
call(['/bin/rm','-rf','xdir'])