After doing some testing on this, it looks like MS uses latin1 (or something very close) internally.

I used a slightly modified version of the example script from Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, replacing the "print" with a database insert.

When processing some data from a spreadsheet into a PostgreSQL database, cells with symbols such as 0xae (ascii 92, the "registered" symbol, ®), I constantly came up against the database error:

DBD::Pg::db do failed: ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF
+8": 0xae
[download]

After setting the client encoding to latin1 (keeping the database at UTF8):

   $dbh->do("set client_encoding to latin1");
[download]

the data went in OK.

If there is a different/better way to process this, I'd be interested to know.

Update: there is a better way...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel;
my $parser   = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel->new();
my $workbook = $parser->Parse('Book1.xls');
binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

foreach my $worksheet ( $workbook->worksheets() ) {
   my ( $row_min, $row_max ) = $worksheet->row_range();
   my ( $col_min, $col_max ) = $worksheet->col_range();
   foreach my $row ( 1 .. $row_max ) {
      foreach my $col ( $col_min .. $col_max ) {
         my $cell = $worksheet->get_cell( $row, $col );
         next unless $cell;
         next unless defined($col_mapping{$col});
         my $value = $cell->value();
         utf8::upgrade($value);
... store_in_database($value); ...
      }
   }
}
[download]

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