Excel export and special characters

Hi,

at first I have to say a big Thank You! tothe team at ChronoEngine!

Now my bug report/question:
The "Backup to Excel/CSV" function screws up my special
chars like "ä, ö, ß".
In the database (the collator is set to UTF-8) everything is fine,
but in the excel backup they are replaced by something silly🙂

The char encoding of my form is also UTF-8.

Is this a bug of Joomla or Chrono Forms?

Regards,
Horst

Hi Horst,

Sorry, I've no idea. Does this happen with both Excel & CSV? I have heard that the CSV output is better.

The code library is from PHP/PEAR so you might find some info in their forums??

Bob

Hi Bob,
that's strange: for me it happens both with Excel and CSV.
For a friend it happens with Excel only.
He has a Mac I have a Winbox.
Seems to be a file encoding problem?!?

Greets,
Horst

Hi Horst,

Sorry, still no idea. Maybe Max will be able to suggest something.

Bob

Hi Horst,

I remember that there was some encoding issue yes, which version of Chronoforms do you have ? please search the forums, it was in a post here sometime ago!

Regards,

Max

Hi Max,

the version I use is:
ChronoForms V2.5 J1.5 RC3.1.zip

I found this article:
http://www.chronoengine.com/component/option,com_fireboard/Itemid,37/func,view/id,7354/catid,2/limit,6/limitstart,12/#7354

But that didn't do the trick.

One workaround for me is to save the data in CSV fromat
and then use OpenOffice's scalc to open it.
scalc asks me which file encoding to use and setting it to UTF-8
works.
That's not too comfortable, at least it works.

Greetings,
Horst

Hi,

I also had a lot of problems exporting to xls on a Mac. All my rows/cols were filled with garbled text
Looks like the current used version of Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer package used in ChronoForms V2.5 J1.5 RC3.1 is not the recent 0.9.1 version or has been changed.

A lot of errors happen in line 1233 of excelwriter/Writer/Worksheet.php in the conditional:

if ($format != 0) {

where the original package says:

if ($format) {

Another one is line 731

function setColumn($firstcol, $lastcol, $width, $format = 0, $hidden = 0, $level = 0)

where the original says:

function setColumn($firstcol, $lastcol, $width, $format = null, $hidden = 0, $level = 0)

I've have replaced wiriter.php with the one from the original 0.9.1 package, changed line 35/36 to the correct required includes and all works perfect now for me.

gr
fonny

Hi fonny,

Good catch. I'd assumed that Max was using the latest version, I don't know where these differences come from :-(

Bob

Hi fonny,

how to change charset is here :

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.fileformats.spreadsheet-excel-writer.spreadsheet-excel-writer-worksheet.setinputencoding.php

I haven't updated the excel files since the last 2 versions I think, I will update this in the next release soon!

one question for you though, is replacing writer.php only fixed the whole problem for you ?

Cheers

Max

Hello Max,

Replacing writer.php solved my problem and exported files open perfect in Excel.

I am using php 5.2.5 & joomla 1.5.3 & Chroncontact 2.5 J1.5 RC3.1

greetings
Fonny

Thanks fonny!

Regards

Max

I am using 3.1 RC5.5 and i have same encoding issues. Its exporting like Cyrillic(windows-1251) not as UTF-8 as should it be?

Where can i get this old writer.php to replace?

Hi vbarlakoski,

I think its from the Pear library http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer.

Bob