I use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel to parse a spreadsheet containing testcases and generate a SQL file (insert into table/fields values...) to populate our testcase database.

Today, I tried to use my script to digest a spreadsheet with a variety of Unicode data:Spanish, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional.

The Unicode data does not come through correctly. For example, Fundación turns into Fundación. 資產 turns into 資產.

I would bet this is an encoding problem, and further that these different languages use different encodings.

How I tried to fix this:

(1) Created an override of the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtDefault per What to do when converting Excel-supplied data to Unicode

(2) Opening the spreadsheet with UTF8 encoding

(3) Opening the spreadsheet with UTF16 encoding

(4) Replacing the TextFmt sub in FmtDefault.pm with the "Unicode fix" identified in http://cpanforum.com/threads/1036.

Unfortunately, none of these worked.

Does anyone have any ideas how to solve this (perplexing!) issue? Thanks much.

In reply to Handling variety of languages/Unicode characters with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel by richb

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