note nikosv <i>I believe Excel stores data using cp1252</i> <p> I don't think that's correct.Excel is Unicode enabled by default. Try it out by entering a character available in the Unicode domain: </p> <p> download a free Japanese font available <a href="http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Japanese.html">here</a> ,install it, open a worksheet and do Insert>Symbol>find the font and click on a letter,save it and then open it again.The character should be there in its original representation. </p> <p> Since MS has a twisted notion of Unicode, I consider that the excel file is saved as UTF16, which is what is considered Unicode by MS (while UTF8 is considered multi-byte) <p> my hunch is that you do some sort of double encoding, so I would suggest to decode the character from UTF16 to UTF8 </p> 980169 980169