Converting Spanish character symbols into UTF8 Format

[Mescoman]

Hey hey people.

I am working on a project where I am using Excel in English, and I have some characters in this Excel which are in Spanish (such as tildes "Público" and "Ñ"s and such). I have a programme which uploads the Excel/CSV into an SQL file, but it doesnt read the Spanish strings properly, instead returning a Square in SQL as if it doesnt recognize the character.

What I have found is that this SQL reads things in the format "Público" properly as their Spanish strings, but misreads Spanish characters. Whoever worked on this before found a way to convert Spanish strings into strings which could be read, and I am pretty sure I've seen this weird Spanish format before when working with CSVs and Excels.

Here is a screenshot to show what I mean a bit better. The first image is what appears on the Excel.

The above "Público" are read properly, while the below "Público" are not read properly.
This second image shows how they up looking in the :

So what I am asking, could someone help me convert the Spanish strings into this weird "Format"? My guess is that this is a standard thing, but I could be wrong and it could be a quirk of the software Im using to upload the Excel/CSV.

Many thanks!

 

[Mescoman]

Update:

Ive not quite solved the problem, but I have found a band-aid solution to it. Basically theres only so many Spanish symbols I am "worried" about here, so if I can find what they appear as in this weird format then I could just do a Find all and Replace to manage it. Here is the

Spanish symbol	Replace with
Á	ERROR
_á	á
É	É
_é	é
Í	ERROR
_í	Ã
Ó	Ó
_ó	ó
Ú	Ú
_ú	ú
Ñ	Ñ
ñ	ñ

Notably, the capital a and i dont have translations. Thats because they appear as the weird A symbol with a space afterwards, like they cant be represented properly in Excel? Im not sure. Ive also found someone with a similar problem to mine, but backwards (it is in Spanish, they are struggling with files which automatically follow the format that I want): Tildes en letras y reportes ú ü à é - Znuny and ((OTRS)) Community Edition

Again, this is a very specific issue, so any help would be appreciated.

Many thanks!

 

[Jaafar Tribak]

Maybe take a look @ John's answer here