Hi,

I too have been having big problems with unicode-encoded stuff in Spreadsheet::ParseExcel (Perl v5.8.4, module v2603).

Happily, I've been having some success with running a modified copy of the FmtDefault class as outlined in bugs 7376 and 168. In summary, my FmtDefault looks like this:

This section occurs somewhere around line 68 of the file.

This change makes it so that accessing

will return one of (a) an ISO-8859-1 string (because that's what the cell contained and no upgrades or conversion was necessary), (b) a UTF-8 string, or (c) an ISO-8859-1 string preceded with a null byte. This third one is apparently a bug that arises when the source text contains a mix of fonts. I'll raise an error report on it later; you can probably ignore that possibility.

For most applications, and a sufficiently modern perl, you don't have to worry about the difference between UTF-8 strings and ISO-8859-1 strings---plain Latin-1 strings should be upgraded where needed, but you may need to tell perl what's what before concatenating mixed latin1/utf strings (see http://www.ahinea.com/en/tech/perl-unicode-struggle.html for more).

As for the conversion of UTF-8 to ISO-8859-7, I've never gotten Unicode::Map and FmtUnicode working correctly. Instead, I use either 'use encoding' (and set the environment variable PERL_ENCODING to the required locale; all plain file I/O is then filtered so that it converts to/from that encoding as the data is written/read) or 'use Encode qw(encode decode)' followed by explicit conversion from utf-8 to the local character set, viz:

And from running this I get:

I hope this was of some help.

Hi again,

I'm glad to hear that the fix worked for you too!

The wide character warning is covered in the link that I mentioned in my last message. The URL is

http://www.ahinea.com/en/tech/perl-unicode-struggle.html

The relevant bit is the second-last section of that document. Specifically, add this to your code to tell perl that STDOUT accepts UTF-8:

I am experiencing a similar problem when attempting to parse an excel file.
I have applied the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtDefault patch. While that patch
does eliminate the 'C' to 'U' error, I am now getting the following errors
(my apologies for the voluminous text):

Uncaught exception from user code:
UTF-16BE:Malformed LO surrogate d899 at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/Encode.pm line 154.
Encode::decode('UTF-16BE','X\x{e7}\x{9e}X9\x{d8}y\x{c4}X \x{d8}\x{99}\x{91}L\x{8b}1-r\x{bb}\x{ee}\x{a4}\x{c1}\x{e1}\x{1d}(\x{e4}v ccfu\x{6}:c\x{1a}\x{9d}\x{b3}\x{ea}\x{81}\x{18}x\x{eb}\x{c1}\x{ed}5\x{d3}\x{91}\x{c6}3\x{e4}\x{99}\x{c6}O\x{9a}8:X4e\x{b6}...') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel/FmtDefault.pm line 77

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtDefault::TextFmt('Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::FmtDefault=HASH(0x86c2fd4)','X\x{e7}\x{9e}X9\x{d8}y\x{c4}X \x{d8}\x{99}\x{91}L\x{8b}1-r\x{bb}\x{ee}\x{a4}\x{c1}\x{e1}\x{1d}(\x{e4}v ccfu\x{6}:c\x{1a}\x{9d}\x{b3}\x{ea}\x{81}\x{18}x\x{eb}\x{c1}\x{ed}5\x{d3}\x{91}\x{c6}3\x{e4}\x{99}\x{c6}O\x{9a}8:X4e\x{b6}...','ucs2') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel.pm line 1094

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::_convBIFF8String('Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook=HASH(0x86c2f2c)',' \x{d2}Y4\x{e5}\x{e7}XX\x{9e}\x{d8}9\x{c4}y X\x{99}\x{d8}L\x{91}1\x{8b}r-\x{ee}\x{bb}\x{c1}\x{a4}\x{1d}\x{e1}\x{e4}( vccuf:\x{6}\x{1a}c\x{b3}\x{9d}\x{81}\x{ea}x\x{18}\x{c1}\x{eb}5\x{ed}\x{91}\x{d3}3\x{c6}\x{99}\x{e4}O\x{c6}8\x{9a}...') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel.pm line 1052

Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::_subWriteAccess('Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Workbook=HASH(0x86c2f2c)',92,112,' \x{d2}Y4\x{e5}\x{e7}XX\x{9e}\x{d8}9\x{c4}y X\x{99}\x{d8}L\x{91}1\x{8b}r-\x{ee}\x{bb}\x{c1}\x{a4}\x{1d}\x{e1}\x{e4}( vccuf:\x{6}\x{1a}c\x{b3}\x{9d}\x{81}\x{ea}x\x{18}\x{c1}\x{eb}5\x{ed}\x{91}\x{d3}3\x{c6}\x{99}\x{e4}O\x{c6}8\x{9a}...') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Spreadsheet/ParseExcel.pm line 428

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.