In addition - this is only if the ? character in the first char in a "cell".  This would work fine: 

name,price
James,1?50

If you have csv file: 

name,price
James,?150

fgetcsv() will remove the ?.

All other chars seem to be fine.

I have searched forums for an answer to this and there are a few people
reporting the same - but no definitive answer.


In addition - this is only if the ? character in the first char in a
"cell".  This would work fine: 

name,price
James,1?50

Thank you for this bug report. To properly diagnose the problem, we
need a short but complete example script to be able to reproduce
this bug ourselves. 

A proper reproducing script starts with <?php and ends with ?>,
is max. 10-20 lines long and does not require any external 
resources such as databases, etc. If the script requires a 
database to demonstrate the issue, please make sure it creates 
all necessary tables, stored procedures etc.

Please avoid embedding huge scripts into the report.

I'm unable to reproduce it with a simple scripts neither with 5.2.6 nor with 5.3.0-dev.

No feedback was provided for this bug for over a week, so it is
being suspended automatically. If you are able to provide the
information that was originally requested, please do so and change
the status of the bug back to "Open".

if have the same problem with php 5.2.6
the csv file looks like this: ???123???;auo123???

$handle = fopen($path."Mappe3.csv","r");
   	while ($data = fgetcsv ($handle, 4096, ";")) { 
	
	print_r($data);
	}
fclose ($handle);

Array
(
    [0] => 123???
    [1] => auo123???
)

with PHP 5.2.5 and 4.4.8  everything is ok ? 
is this a bug or a feature ?

based on [mk at kurznet dot com]

a change of the locale information helps.

setlocale(LC_ALL,'de_DE.8859-1');


setting the locale information to a unicode or UTF locale names will lose the first letters.

fgetcsv() seems to throw the first character away if it is invalid in the current locale, but ignores invalid characters which are not at the beginning of a cell. This code reproduces the problem in PHP 5.3.6:

<?php

setlocale(LC_ALL,'C');
$utfchar = chr(0xC3).chr(0x89); // U+009C in UTF-8

$csv = $utfchar."x".$utfchar."x\n";

file_put_contents('test.csv', $csv);
$file = fopen('test.csv', 'r');
$data = fgetcsv($file);

for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($data[0]); $i++) {
    echo dechex(ord($data[0][$i])).' ';
}
echo "\n";
unlink('test.csv');

// expected: c3 89 78 c3 89 78 - "ÉxÉx"
// actual: 78 c3 89 78 - "xÉx"

?>

I agree with the commenter in bug 12127 that a CSV function should not mess with encodings in the first place, just copy the content byte-by-byte.

This happens to every NON ASCII char as the first char in a cell.