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There is an option in Excel 2016 to export as a UTF-8 comma delimited CSV file. I don't want commas between fields- i want tabs.
I save the file as a tab-delimited txt file. In the Save As dialogue, I go to "Tools" then "Web Options" then "Encoding" and choose UTF-8. Then I open it with Sublime Text 3- the IDE I use to write python scripts to manipulate the file (It's too big to open in Notepad).
It's a large file with around 200,000 Russian sentences along with translations. The other text looks fine, but the Russian characters all show up as ???? ????. Completely useless.
The comma delimited CSV works perfectly. Is there just no way to successfully save a tab-delimited UTF-8 CSV file in Excel?
My guess would be that those weboptions only apply to actual web formats and/or whatever way you're using to save them as tab delimited falls back to pure ASCII encoding. What steps are you using to save/export each format? – Seth – 2016-11-29T07:28:24.800
Well, I have been looking around the Web all night. The Web Options thing seems to have been the standard solution for the past decade or so. – Deersfeet – 2016-11-29T09:36:42.883
Did you check the Encoding used for the file that has the ??? in it? If you can't open the file, how did you check for the missing Russian characters? Did you consider replacing the commas with a tab through Sublime? – Seth – 2016-11-29T11:46:34.320
@Seth: The problem is the sentences (which are the fields of this foreign language CSV) contain commas. – Deersfeet – 2016-12-13T00:13:32.713