CSV Encoding Issues: UTF-8, BOM, and Latin-1
Diagnose and fix CSV encoding problems: BOM markers, mojibake, Windows-1252 vs UTF-8, and how to detect encoding automatically.
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Tags: data, csv, encoding
CSV Encoding Issues: UTF-8, BOM, Latin-1, and How to Fix Them You've received a CSV from a client, a legacy system, or an Excel export. You try to parse it and get: . Or you parse it successfully but the first column header has a prefix you can't delete. Or accented characters like and become garbage like and . These are encoding issues. This guide covers the practical cases: what encoding problems look like, how to detect them, and how to fix them across Python, Node.js, and the browser. --- Why CSV Encoding Is a Problem CSV is a plain text format with no built-in encoding declaration. There's no equivalent of XML's header. The file is just bytes — and the parser has to guess what those bytes mean. The three encodings you'll encounter in the wild: | Encoding | Origin | Common in |…
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