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in reply to Re^4: Parsing a .xlsx file with chinese characters
in thread Parsing a .xlsx file with chinese characters

You're right; I ran it on a Linux VM.

If you're running this in the Windows terminal (cmd.exe or what have you), I'm inclined to think the problem isn't with the output from Excel::Spreadsheet, but that cmd doesn't display UTF-8 properly.

What if you redirect the output of the script to a .html file, then try loading it in a browser? Make sure the encoding gets detected as UTF-8. If it displays correctly, it's just the terminal, and your data is fine. :)

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Re^6: Parsing a .xlsx file with chinese characters
by Sithiris (Novice) on Oct 05, 2011 at 21:17 UTC

    I have said in my script to print to a UTF8 encoded text file which I opened in word and it displayed correctly just wrong characters.

    what I am thinking is that it may be 'deconstructing the character for example instead of "\x{2013}" it is displaying "\xE2","\x80","\x93". If this is the case would there be a way to force it?

      I think Word is probably half-responsible for the mangling here. If it's trying to display each byte, then it means it's not actually reading it as UTF-8, but in some other encoding!

      I'll give an example using Windows. First, here's utf8.pl:

      # U+73E0 ("pearl") print "\xe7\x8f\xa0";

      Now, I execute that and redirect it to both utf8.html and utf8.txt.

      Chrome displays the character correctly, because it assumes UTF-8 by default. Notepad also appears smart enough to guess the encoding.

      On my system at least, opening the file with Word prompts me to select the encoding; and by default, it guesses UTF-8 and renders the character correctly. Note that if I pick "Windows (Default)" or "MS-DOS", I get garbage.

      So try messing with Word a bit; if you use the File -> Open menu (instead of just opening the file from Explorer directly), you can get additional conversion options (sometimes!).

      Anne

        Well I solved my problem using

        pack "U0C*", unpack "C*", ($cell->{val});

        I'm not entirely sure what that does, but I'm guessing it unpacks the characters into its octets and then repackages it up as a Unicode character... Anyway whatever it does it worked so now all the characters are displayed correctly.

        Thank you for your help :)