What is the best CSV encoding?

Question

What's the encoding I should use for my CSV file? UTF-8 encoding, also referred to as "Unicode - UTF8" UTF-8 encoded CSV files will work well with Accompa whether they contain just English characters, or also contain non-English characters such as é, ç, ü. ANSI encoding.

Which is better ANSI or UTF-8?

UTF-8 is superior in every way to ANSI.

Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?

If your data is mostly in western languages and you want to reduce the amount of storage needed, go with UTF-8 as for those languages it will take about half the storage of UTF-16.

What is the most common CSV format?

The version of Excel provided with Office 365 has the largest number of format options, including the largest number of CSV options. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1. Excel lets you save workbook data in a plethora of formats.

Is ASCII or UTF-8 more efficient?

There is absolutely no difference in this case; UTF-8 is identical to ASCII in this character range. If storage is an important consideration, maybe look into compression. A simple Huffman compression will use something like 3 bits per byte for this kind of data.

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