Not exactly sure I understood how you extracted the textual data from the Excel file... but for converting Windows unicode (UTF-16) plain text files into UTF-8, the following should do the trick: 

use strict;
use warnings;

open IN,  "<:encoding(utf16le)", "test.utf16le" or die $!;
open OUT, ">:encoding(utf8)",    "test.utf8"    or die $!;

while (my $line = <IN>){
    print OUT $line;

}
close IN;
close OUT

[download]

The idea is essentially to tell Perl what your existing input and desired output encoding is, and letting Perl do the rest.

Update: BTW, if the input file contains a BOM (which it almost always does on Windows), it would have been sufficient to specify :encoding(utf16). Perl can figure out itself that the file is in little-endian format in this case. Interestingly though, the output file does not contain a UTF-8 BOM when doing it that way — I never really understood the reasoning behind that behaviour...  (When you convert it as shown above, however, the output file will have a BOM (presumably because it's then converted just like any other codepoint), which is recommended on Windows.)

In reply to Re: Getting Data from an Excel File by almut
in thread Getting Data from an Excel File by mrguy123

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