I'm trying to extract data from Excel spreadsheets. I'm pretty sure most of the data in these spreadsheets is encoded as ISO 8859-1. Because this data is going into an XML file, and from there into a MySQL database, I'm trying to do The Right Thing and coerce the data into Unicode as early as possible.

Here's the problem:
Some of the data appears to be in a different encoding. As a specific example, it sometimes contains a "—" (that's a em-dash character, hopefully) which gets extracted as ^S (CTRL-S, try typing that in an xterm :) ). To my knowledge, this isn't in ISO 8859-1.

At the moment, I'm writing character-specific code that processes each character on a case-by-case basis. E.g. I'm converting Excel's rendition of em dash to "--". Is this the best way of doing it? should I be decodeing from a different character set?

Update: It looks like the em dash character is in Windows-1252, a superset of ISO 8859-1... perhaps that's the encoding I'm seeing... but using "cp1252" as the argument to decode doesn't seem to fix the problem.

davis
Kids, you tried your hardest, and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.

In reply to What to do when converting Excel-supplied data to Unicode by davis

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