Re^6: Parsing a .xlsx file with chinese characters

[Sithiris]

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?

[anneli]

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

[Sithiris]

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 :)

[anneli]

How curious! I'm glad you got it working. :)