Parsing a .xlsx file with chinese characters

[Sithiris]

Hi, I am fairly new to writing perl scripts and as of yet I have not really wrote any scripts that require other modules, so my understanding of how to do this may be wrong.

Recently my work has requested that I produce a script capable of converting an xlsx file to a UTF-8 encoded flat file. Due to my lack of experience I first focused on using Spreadsheet::XLSX to actually parse a sample file and that appeared to work fine, however when I used my actual file which contained Chinese characters the characters were not displayed correctly; does anyone have any advice on how to get around this problem?

[CountZero]

It would be most helpful if you could post a small script that actually shows the problem you describe. There are so many ways to break UTF-8 encoded files. It is even entirely possible that the problem is with the program you use to view the flat file.

[Sithiris]

At the moment I am just using the synopsis code found on the Spreadsheet::XLSX cpan page

use Spreadsheet::XLSX;
 
 my $excel = Spreadsheet::XLSX -> new ('sample.xlsx');
 
 foreach my $sheet (@{$excel -> {Worksheet}}) {
 
        printf("Sheet: %s\n", $sheet->{Name});
        
        $sheet -> {MaxRow} ||= $sheet -> {MinRow};
        
         foreach my $row ($sheet -> {MinRow} .. $sheet -> {MaxRow}) {
         
                $sheet -> {MaxCol} ||= $sheet -> {MinCol};
                
                foreach my $col ($sheet -> {MinCol} ..  $sheet -> {Max
+Col}) {
                
                        my $cell = $sheet -> {Cells} [$row] [$col];
 
                        if ($cell) {
                            printf("( %s , %s ) => %s\n", $row, $col, 
+$cell -> {Val});
                        }
 
                }
 
        }
 
 }

This output everything fine including more standard Unicode characters however with the Chinese characters it output characters like 礼�…��…’�—�œ‰�™��…�司�–�天�œ� instead. I know it is a problem with how I am using the module as I managed to get a script working ok with Spreadsheet::Parse Excel and a .xls file however my work requires the files to be .xlsx and so I can not use this script

[anneli]

I gave this a test with the exact code you gave on my machine, and it worked great!

$ perl test.pl
Sheet: Sheet1
( 0 , 0 ) => this
( 1 , 1 ) => is
( 2 , 2 ) => a
( 3 , 3 ) => test
( 4 , 1 ) => 什麼
Sheet: Sheet2
Sheet: Sheet3
$

(PM may convert the text (traditional Chinese "shenme" -- what) into an entity here, but it definitely worked in my xterm)

It may be that whatever you're using to view the file isn't expecting UTF-8; or, perhaps the encoding in the XLSX itself isn't UTF-8 (but I'm not sure if that's an option in XLSX files or what!).