CSV import bugs are almost never about the data. They are about a comma inside a quoted field, a CRLF where an LF was expected, or a missing BOM that turns Renée into Renée in Excel. All three are controls here.
What you can control
- Four delimiters, including semicolon for locales where the comma is a decimal separator.
- Quote-everything mode, for importers that cannot handle selective quoting.
- CRLF line endings for Windows tooling that still expects them.
- The UTF-8 BOM toggle is the single fix for Excel mangling accented characters.
What this is not
Values containing the delimiter, a quote or a newline are quoted and escaped per RFC 4180. If your importer does not follow that spec, the file is correct and the importer is not.
Questions
Why does Excel mangle my accented characters?
Excel assumes the system codepage unless the file starts with a UTF-8 byte order mark. Turn the BOM on and the accents survive.
When should I use semicolons?
In locales where the comma is the decimal separator — most of continental Europe. Excel there defaults to semicolon-delimited files.
How are embedded commas handled?
The field is wrapped in double quotes, and any quote inside it is doubled. That is RFC 4180, which nearly every parser implements.