Export csv file with encoding in MVC controller

Question

I have the following controller action used to export a csv file

public ActionResult ExportExcel(int projectId)
        {
            var risks = new RiskRepository().GetRisksByProjectId(projectId);
            var commaDelimmeted =
                    risks.Select(
                        r => r.RiskDescription + "," + r.RiskTypeId.ToString() + "," + r.Likelihood.ToString() + "," + r.Impact + "," + r.Action + "," + r.ActionBy + ",")
                        .ToList();

            string data = commaDelimmeted.Aggregate(string.Empty, (current, line) => current + line + Environment.NewLine);

            Response.ClearContent();
            Response.Buffer = true;
            // set the header
            var aliasName = "someFile.csv";
            Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + aliasName);
            Response.ContentType = "application/csv";
            Response.Charset = "";
            Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
            Response.Output.Write(data);
            Response.Flush();
            Response.End();

            return File(Response.OutputStream, "application/csv");
        }

The output csv file do not show right to left langauge characters properly, so I've set response content encoding header the problem still exists.

Any thoughts?

Edit : Looking at Darin's solution in this post didn't fix my problem , the output shows System.Byte[] in the csv output file.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Based on this post, it turns out the encoding preamble must be appended to the csv data like this :

using (var sw = System.IO.File.Create(csvPath))
            {
                var preamble = Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble();
                sw.Write(preamble, 0, preamble.Length);
                var databytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);
                sw.Write(databytes, 0, data.Length);
            }

and this did the trick.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 10 '16 at 11:00

0

 Have you tried setting the encoding in a meta tag in the HTML?

 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
   Excel won't see the response headers, so it won't know what the Response.Encoding is. The meta tag allows it to find out.

answered Aug 10 '16 at 11:00

Văn Tuấn Phạm

657
4
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do you mean that I have to append this to my data string? – Voice Of The Rain Aug 10 '16 at 11:07

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 10 '16 at 11:09

0

Unless you absolutely need it to be a CSV file I'd recommend converting it to use ClosedML (available on NuGet) to generate a proper XLSX file - you can then use the GetMimeMapping function and return a FileStreamResult.

answered Aug 10 '16 at 11:09

PhillipH

6,182
1
15
25

Export csv file with encoding in MVC controller

3 Answers3