Re^3: Handling variety of languages/Unicode characters with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel

The Encoding method returns 1 (8bit ASCII or single byte UTF-16) for the Spanish text

I don't know where that description is coming from, but it suggests a serious misunderstanding of the terms being used.

You can say "single-byte ASCII" (which is redundant, since ASCII by definition uses only 7 bits), but it's strange to say "8bit ASCII", because ASCII does not refer to values in the 0x80-0xFF range, and people usually speak of "8-bit characters" as being in contrast to ASCII (because 8-bit characters are the ones in the range 0x80-0xFF).

Saying "single byte UTF16" is simply nonsensical. It's an oxymoron.

Comment on Re^3: Handling variety of languages/Unicode characters with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel

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Re^4: Handling variety of languages/Unicode characters with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel by richb (Scribe) on Apr 09, 2010 at 14:26 UTC
I copied the text in parentheses from the page you linked to, which explains the encoding method's return values: The encoding() method returns one of the following values: * 0: Unknown format. This shouldn't happen. In the default case th +e format should be 1. * 1: 8bit ASCII or single byte UTF-16. This indicates that the cha +racters are encoded in a single byte. In Excel 95 and earlier This us +ually meant ASCII or an international variant. In Excel 97 it refers +to a compressed UTF-16 character string where all of the high order b +ytes are 0 and are omitted to save space. * 2: UTF-16BE. * 3: Native encoding. In Excel 95 and earlier this encoding was us +ed to represent multi-byte character encodings such as SJIS. [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: Handling variety of languages/Unicode characters with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 09, 2010 at 14:46 UTC
I copied the text in parentheses from the page you linked to You mean the page that eff_i_g linked to... that's good to know. The full explanation that you quoted for the "* 1." return value is indeed pretty silly. Better to describe that as "single-byte encoding (typically cp1252, but possibly some other single-byte code page)". The notion of a "compressed UTF-16 character string where all of the high order bytes are 0 and are omitted to save space" is nonsensical, but if it made any sense, it would actually be referring to "ISO-8859-1", but since Excel is a M$ product, I would expect this to be cp1252 (or similar) instead, using code points in the 0x80-0x9f range for various punctuations marks, etc (whereas ISO-8859 has them as "special control characters" that are all non-displayable).	[reply]