exporting from DB to CSV - encoding issues with arabic characters

[zeemperor]

I’m trying to export from DB content that includes Arabic letters.
When I export to CSV/XLS it appears as ???????? or الØ*مراوي
I use this code:

$query = "SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci'";
mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());


function CSVExport($query,$filename = 'data') {
    $sql_csv = mysql_query($query) or die("Error: " . mysql_error()); 
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
    //header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
    header("Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate");
    header("Pragma: public"); 
    header("Content-type:text/octect-stream");
    header("Content-Disposition:attachment;filename=$filename.csv");
    
    while($row = mysql_fetch_row($sql_csv)) {
        print '"' . stripslashes(implode('","',$row)) . "\"\n";
    }
    exit;
}


 CSVExport("SELECT * from `arabictable`", 'myexportfile');

Anyone has idea how do I fix this? How do I see Arabic letters correctly?

[Fou-Lu]

Open that up in an editor that supports utf8. Does it show the characters as expected?
You'll probably need a content-encoding header as well. Not sure why your content type is text/html, that should be either text/csv or application/csv (or even text/plain), but overall that won't make a tremendous difference to an attachment. You may need to transfer in binary for this as well.