DBeaver CSV Turkish Characters Broken? Fix with UTF-8 BOM (Complete Guide)

FrontEnd Author 04/05/2026

If Turkish characters like ş, ğ, ü, ö, ç, ı, İ appear corrupted when exporting CSV files from DBeaver to Excel, this guide will show you how to fix it permanently using UTF-8 BOM encoding.

Quick Summary:

Problem = Encoding mismatch (UTF-8 vs Windows-1252)
Best fix = Export CSV as UTF-8 BOM
Alternative = Import via Excel with UTF-8

The Problem

When exporting data from DBeaver as CSV and opening it in Excel, Turkish characters may appear as:

?, Ã, Â, �

This happens due to a character encoding mismatch and is a common issue when working with multilingual databases.

Why Does This Happen?

DBeaver exports files using UTF-8 encoding
Excel (Windows) defaults to ANSI / Windows-1252
No BOM marker → Excel guesses encoding incorrectly

Without a BOM, Excel cannot detect UTF-8 automatically.

Fix 1 — Export CSV with UTF-8 BOM (Recommended)

The easiest and most reliable solution is exporting the CSV with a UTF-8 BOM marker.

Steps

Run your query in DBeaver
Right-click the result grid → Export Data
Select CSV
Find Encoding
Change it to UTF-8 BOM
Finish export

Excel will now correctly display Turkish characters.

Fix 2 — Set Default Encoding in DBeaver

To avoid changing settings every time, configure DBeaver globally:

Go to Window → Preferences
Navigate to General → Workspace
Set Text file encoding = UTF-8
Click Apply

This ensures consistent encoding across exports.

Fix 3 — Open CSV Correctly in Excel

If the file is already exported:

Open Excel
Go to Data → From Text/CSV
Select your file
Set encoding to 65001: UTF-8
Load data

Fix 4 — Check CSV Delimiter

In some regions (like Turkey), Excel expects semicolon (;) instead of comma.

Delimiter: ;

Incorrect delimiter may look like encoding issues.

Quick Solution Table

Problem	Solution
Characters broken	Export with UTF-8 BOM
Permanent fix needed	Change DBeaver encoding settings
File already exported	Import via Excel UTF-8
Columns misaligned	Use semicolon delimiter

DBeaver Licensing

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Students can apply for a free academic license: dbeaver.com/academic