How to extract multilingual to MS Excel

[Ace-t]

How can I extract multilingual data into MS Excel application. At the moment
the data extracted into Excel file is not readable. Currently using CFMX with
the following code to export data to MS Excel;

<cfcontent type="application/msexcel">
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="filename=report.xls">

What extra coding need to add to set the multilanguage to be readable in MS
Excel? (On the website it displays the characters fine)

[PaulH]

define "unreadable"? what encoding is your data, your cf page, etc.?

[Ace-t]

Hi Paul,
When extracted to MS Excel from CF the character comes out as question marks.
The chinese data is from a query to a SQL Server table.
I am using the following encoding for the chinese character sets.
<!--- Setting up right encoding --->
<cfset URLenChar = "UTF-8" >
<!--- Set encoding to UTF-8. --->
<cfset setEncoding("URL", "UTF-8")>
<cfset setEncoding("Form", "UTF-8")>
<!--- Set the output encoding to UTF-8 --->
<cfcontent type="text/html; charset=UTF-8" reset ="No">
<!--}}}-->
<!--- Use the request to get the client's prefered locale --->
<!--{{{ -->
<cfset localize = getPageContext().getRequest().GetLocale()>
<cfif not isDefined("localize")>
<!--- then use the default locale of the system we're running on --->
<cfset request.locale = createObject("java",
"java.util.Locale").getDefault().getLanguage() >
<cfelse>
<cfset request.locale = localize.getLanguage()>
</cfif>

This code does work when it is used to display the chinese characters on the
website as mentioned, however when I invoke MS Excel apllication (with the
codes from the first msg) the data in the comes out as question marks. In
short, the simple CF page just contains the above encoding for the character
set and a query to SQL table to retrieve the data. What code do I need to add
to extract the character set correctly into MS Excel?

[PaulH]

question marks are bad, it means the data is corrupted. and fyi, boxs aren't so bad, it means the browser/whatever can't render that char.

i'll see what i can reproduce.

[PaulH]

it looks like excel doesn't like utf-8 encoding. even when i simply dumped out
utf-8 to a CSV file and tried importing it, the excel text was mojibake. it
seems to only work with utf-16/unicode (little endian). further evidence
assuming google ads knows what it's doing, it downloads ad sense/etc CSV
reports as unicode (utf-16) encoding.

googling though turns up conflicting info (some references say it can use
utf-8 others say it can). there also seems to be a way via XML but i think that
only works for excel 2003 and better.

need to dig a bit more.

[Ace-t]

Hi Paul,
Thanks for the feedback, I do hope you will find a method as I don't have any ideas!
Tom

[PaulH]

right now the cheapest solution seems to be to cast your data/page encoding to
utf-16. another approach might be thru 3rd party tools like
[url]http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/[/url][/L (the POI-HSSF bits). though these maybe
overkill.