Re: Help on international characters with Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer

Thanks to all for the answers. After looking at them and internally with a php expert, it was finally solved. The problem is that, somehow, Excel does not recognize the output of the Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer as being a multi byte file. As everything coming from the mysql database is in utf-8, and excel thinks the file is in mono-byte charset, bingo, houston, we've got a problem... I'm not sure why, and I do not want to look into it right now. Simple workaround : in our app (php bug tracker), I added a utf8_decode to all the character strings being sent to Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer. This transformed them in mono-byte character string (ISO-8859-1), which did the trick. So far, this is all I need. Later on, if we need to use this feature for arabic or chinese or any other non ISO-8859-1 charsets, well... Thanks again to all Regards > > ----- Message from Vincent.Bartro@alcatel.fr on Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11: > 33:30 +0100 ----- > > To: > > pear-general@lists.php.net > > Subject: > > Help on international characters with Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer > > Hello all, > > I'm using PhpBugTracker (freeware bug tracking tool, based on php/mysql), > which includes an excel export functionality, using > Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer. > Strangely, all international characters (like French accentuated > characters) show correctly in the web pages, but they don't in the excel > export. > I have tried several combinations of column types in mysql, of policies in > excel, of charset setup in Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer (using > $worksheet->setInputEncoding('utf-8') for exampel), with no success. > > Here is the piece of code which I identified in phpBT which does the excel > export. As you can see, I have added (identified with VB comments) a > setVersion and a setInput Encoding. > As you may also noticed, I have added hard coded accentuated data in an > extra column, just to try to figure out if the problem comes from the > Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer or from the data coming from the database. (see > the essai accent éùà). This last column shows OK... > > I'm now stuck. Does the issue come from Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer? Seems > not... Does it come from mysql? Seems not (as it shows OK in the html > pages)... Does it come from somewhere else???? > > Thanks all for your help. Please note I am using : > EasyPhp v1.8.01 > Spreadsheet/Excel/Write v0.9.1 > OLE 0.5 > > Code extract : > > include_once('Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer.php'); > $workbook = new Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer(); > $workbook->send('buglist.xls'); > //VB > $workbook->setVersion(9); > //VB > error_reporting(0); > $boldformat =& $workbook->addformat(array('bold' => 1)); > $worksheet =& $workbook->addworksheet('buglist'); > //VB > $worksheet->setInputEncoding('utf-8'); > //VB > $row = 0; > for ($i = 0, $colcount = count($fields); $i < $colcount; $i++) { > $worksheet->write($row, $i, $titles[$i], > $boldformat); > } > $row++; > for ($i = 0, $bugcount = count($data); $i < $bugcount; $i++) { > for ($j = 0; $j < $colcount; $j++) { > $worksheet->setInputEncoding('utf-8'); > $worksheet->write($row, $j, > format_spreadsheet_col($data[$i][$fields[$j]], $fields[$j])); > } > $worksheet->write($row, $j, "essai accent éùà" . > CHARSET,$boldformat); > $row++; > } > $worksheet->freezepanes(array(1, 0)); > $workbook->close(); >