Re: UTF-8 problem (XLS)

[John Coppens <john jcoppens com>]

On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:22:39 +0100
Nick Lamb <njl tlrmx org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 11:04 -0300, John Coppens wrote:
> > The origin of the strange characters in the file still unclear. These
> > xls files are sent to my wife's pharmacy monthly with updates.
>
> It would be interesting to know some things if you have access to MS
> Excel on Windows or Mac or to the (zero cost) Microsoft Excel viewer
> program on Windows and time to experiment.
>
> * Do these characters appear visually to be the same in Excel as in
> Gnumeric when you load the file ? I get the impression from previous
> emails that the answer is "No", but I'm not quite clear.

Hi Nick.
I don't usually use Windows, and I don't have Office. But my notebook
came with W$ preinstalled, and I just left it enough space for
experiments. I downloaded and installed Excel viewer.

Yes, the characters are the same. Which confirms my theory that the
characters were imported from DOS (OEM charset) without conversion.

> * If you re-save the Excel file (perhaps slightly alter the text in one
> cell to make sure you're really saving a new file) from Excel does it
> make a difference to the strange characters when imported into
> Gnumeric ?

Can't do that here, but I'll try at the university this evening.
 
> The former would tell us whether Excel itself can figure out what's
> going on here and get the right characters (in which case Gnumeric can
> probably learn how to do the same) and the latter would tell us whether
> perhaps the file sent to the pharmacy is non-standard in some way while
> the same data when saved by Excel itself can be read correctly.

I just believe some export or import filter used to generate the xls file
ignored the OEM_850 (or whatever) coding and considered them Windows
charset (Latin).

> Might you be able to make (a copy of) the file available to one of the
> developers to look into further? 

Not a problem. Who should I send it to? I'll add comments with offsets of
where the strings are.

Thanks,
John