Excel on MacOS has its own quirk when dealing with CSV file. If you have a CSV file that is encoded with UTF-8 and contains entries in multibyte characters from East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, opening the file in Excel on MacOS may give you some surprise. Instead of showing the East Asian characters, Excel will display garbled characters.

Let us a run experiment to explain this case. We will use Node JS to create a CSV file, encode the file using UTF-8 and then try to open it using Excel on MacOS. Continue reading →