Data exported from CSV flat file to SQL Server mis-encodes diacritical marks?

[seasonedweb]

Hello

I need to keep the accent marks in the SQL Server database.

My imported data (4000 + records) from a CSV in Excel contains hundreds of French diacriticals:

• é –  (l'accent aigu)
• à/è/ì/ò/ù – (l'accent grave)
• â/ê/î/ô/û –  (l'accent circonflexe)
• ç – (la cédille)
• ë/ï/ü –  (l'accent tréma)

Each instance in the strings have changed to ? diamonds no matter what they were supposed to be. Is there a way to repair them after they have been imported or do I need to do this in the CSV file before the import, if possible?  What character encoding will SQL Server keep?

Thanks for any help with this.

[seasonedweb · Accepted solution]

I will change the character encoding to UTF-8 when saving xlsx to CSV I think I solved the issue-

Thanks for looking.

[BKBK]

UTF-8, that's the one! 🙂