in reply to writing Arabic text in Excel

The Spreadsheet::WriteExcel write() method expects unicode data to be in utf8 format (in perl5.8).

You indicate that the data you are reading from Word is ISO-8859-6 but it may be UTF-16LE, which most Windows applications use internally.

Either way you should try to convert it to UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 if you are using write().

You can also write UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE data using the (poorly named) write_unicode() and write_unicode_le() methods.

--
John.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: writing Arabic text in Excel
by pg09 (Acolyte) on Apr 03, 2006 at 23:27 UTC
    Thanks for your response! However, I'm not able to install Unicode::Map8 through 'ppm' on my Windows 2000 machine. It complains: "Searching for 'Unicode::Map8' returned no results. Try a broader search first." I'm however sure the module is present in the 'C:\Perl\lib' directory. Please advise.
[reply]
      I haven't gone further than the following, but googling with perl unicode map8 ppm leads to an alternative site of ppm's which seems to have something built on Aug 1, 2003. Elsewhere(?) I notice several ppm's that are built for 5.6

      This is G o o g l e's cache of http://apache.hoxt.com/perl/win32-bin/ppmpackages/ as retrieved on Feb 26, 2006 09:28:24 GMT.
[reply]
[d/l]
      I'm not able to install Unicode::Map8 through 'ppm' on my Windows 2000 machine.

      If you are using Perl 5.8 you can use the core Encode module to convert between encodings.

      See also the perluniintro and perlunicode manpages for more information.

      --
      John.

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom