I had the very same issue. The answer is that you are doing it right already. It is the problem of MS Excel. Try opening the file with another editor and you will notice that your encoding was successful already. To make MS Excel happy, move from UTF-8 to UTF-16. This should work:
class UnicodeWriter:
def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel_tab, encoding="utf-16", **kwds):
# Redirect output to a queue
self.queue = StringIO.StringIO()
self.writer = csv.writer(self.queue, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
self.stream = f
# Force BOM
if encoding=="utf-16":
import codecs
f.write(codecs.BOM_UTF16)
self.encoding = encoding
def writerow(self, row):
# Modified from original: now using unicode(s) to deal with e.g. ints
self.writer.writerow([unicode(s).encode("utf-8") for s in row])
# Fetch UTF-8 output from the queue ...
data = self.queue.getvalue()
data = data.decode("utf-8")
# ... and reencode it into the target encoding
data = data.encode(self.encoding)
# strip BOM
if self.encoding == "utf-16":
data = data[2:]
# write to the target stream
self.stream.write(data)
# empty queue
self.queue.truncate(0)
def writerows(self, rows):
for row in rows:
self.writerow(row)