Re: UTF-8 problem (XLS)

[John Coppens <john jcoppens com>]

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:52:46 +0100
Nick Lamb <njl tlrmx org> wrote:

> This is not a Gnumeric problem
>
> The ISO 8859-1 character set does not include U+201A, so iconv is
> objecting because this transformation loses information.

That was the problem - I had just accepted that ISO 8859-1 would have the
character.

The origin of the strange characters in the file still unclear. These xls
files are sent to my wife's pharmacy monthly with updates.

I have the impression that the xls file was generated from another format
and it contains many rather unusual codings for accented characters (such
as the í, coded as 0xA1 in the xls file, resulting in utf-8 C2A1 -
inverted exclamation mark. The 0xA1 seems to come from the DOS character
set, but I can't imagine how it was copied directly into the spreadsheet)

So, what should have utf-16 in the xls, seems to be actually DOS
characters in utf-16 format.

Thanks!
John