Grabbing a non-english character in jexcelapi

Question

I have an excel sheet with some non-english characters in it and when I try to grab the contents via

sheet.getColumn(column)[row].getContents()

It returns the string with the replacement character \uFFFD instead of the non-english character which I was going to then translate to unicode using StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava.

//"L\u00F6schen" - correct
return StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava("Löschen"); 

//"L\uFFFDschen" - incorrect
return StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava(sheet.getColumn(column)[row].getContents());

//"L�schen" - incorrect
System.out.print(sheet.getColumn(column)[row].getContents());

Answer 1

This was really frustrating and it seems that jexcelapi is missing a lot of support.

Went with Apache POI instead and it worked great with no issues.

Answer 2

Try to set encoding through WorkbookSettings when initializing Workbook. For example:

WorkbookSettings settings = new WorkbookSettings();
settings.setEncoding("Your java charset name");
Workbook workbook = Workbook.getWorkbook(source, settings);

Then getContents() method should correct content of cell