UTF-8 vs ANSI CSV

UTF-8 Encoding

UTF-8 is the universal standard for text encoding. It supports all Unicode characters including accents (é, ñ, ü), currency symbols (€, £, ¥), and non-Latin scripts (中文, العربية, 日本語). Every modern system supports UTF-8, and it should be your default choice for CSV files.

ANSI / Latin-1

ANSI (Windows-1252) and ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) are legacy encodings that only support Western European characters. Files saved as ANSI in Excel or older systems will break when imported into UTF-8 systems. Characters outside the Latin-1 range become garbled mojibake text.

The BOM Issue

A UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) is an invisible character (U+FEFF) at the start of a file. While harmless in most contexts, some systems treat it as part of the first column name, causing header mismatches. For maximum compatibility, save CSV files as "UTF-8 without BOM."

How to Fix Encoding

Open the file in a text editor (VS Code, Notepad++), check the encoding shown in the status bar, and re-save as UTF-8. In Excel: Save As → CSV UTF-8. Use our CSV Validator or CSV Health Score to detect encoding issues automatically.