Using UTF-8 or UTF-16 Unicode characters in a csv file can be a hassle when using Excel to manage these files in spreadsheets. When using a default language in ASCII format, there are not many problems with this, as long as the regional settings of your pc are set to that language. But in case you have to handle multiple languages, it could become a little exhausting, switching the default language of your pc before doing your spreadsheet job. A popular osCommerce contribution used for mass categories / products import and export, like Easy Populate, relies heavily on csv files. This article will assist you maintaining unicode characters in a csv formatted file. 

Magento is an Open Source ecommerce web application launched on March 31, 2008. It was created by Varien, building on components of the Zend Framework.

Compared to osCommerce and other open source e-commerce solutions, it is a complete set of tools to run an e-commerce site with almost all thinkable features. Unfortunately there is no slim basic version available, so even on a dedicated server this beauty with a package size of 45 MB and it's 229 databse tables will use a lot of server resources and can slow down your customers a bit.

UTF-8 can encode any Unicode character, preventing the need to set a encoding type for every language that is going to be used in the site and allowing output in multiple languages at the same time. I would recommend to use this type of encoding in case you are setting up a multilingual e-shop on a MySQL5 / PHP5 platform.