Excel doesnt recognize non english special characters [duplicate]

You should add the UTF-8 BOM at the start of the text, like:

var csvContent = "data:text/csv;charset=utf-8,%EF%BB%BF" + encodeURI(csvContent);

It worked for me with Excel 2013.

Demo Fiddle

You can add the BOM at first, use this code and try

var BOM = "\uFEFF"; 
var csvContent = BOM + csvContent;

and then crate the file headers with the data: "text/csv;charset=utf-8"

Excel is really bad at detecting encoding, especially Excel on OSX.

The best solution would be to encode your CSV in the default Excel encoding: windows-1252 (also called ANSI, which is basically a subset of ISO-8859-1).

I put a complete example of how to do that at: https://github.com/b4stien/js-csv-encoding.

The 2 main parts are stringencoding (to encode the content of your CSV in windows-1252) and FileSaver.js (to download the generated Blob).

It looks like:

var csvContent = 'éà; ça; 12\nà@€; çï; 13',
    textEncoder = new TextEncoder('windows-1252');


var csvContentEncoded = textEncoder.encode([csvContent]);
var blob = new Blob([csvContentEncoded], {type: 'text/csv;charset=windows-1252;'});
saveAs(blob, 'some-data.csv');

Option 1

use iconv-lite library and encode your output to ascii before send it back to the user. Example:

var iconv = require('iconv-lite');
buf = iconv.encode(str, 'win1255'); // return buffer with windows-1255 encoding

Option 2

Write on the head of the file the BOM header of UTF-8 encoding. Example:

res.header('Content-type', 'text/csv; charset=utf-8');
res.header('Content-disposition', 'attachment; filename=excel.csv'); 
res.write(Buffer.from('EFBBBF', 'hex')); // BOM header

// rest of your code

Option 3

Use base64 url format like data:text/csv;base64,77u/Zm9vLGJhcg0KYWFhLGJiYg==. This method will work on client-side also (IE10+, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari).

For example:

window.location = "data:text/csv;base64,77u/" + btoa("foo,bar\r\naaa,bbb");