What charset does Microsoft Excel use when saving files?

excel encoding character-encoding
Joel picture Joel · Feb 3, 2009 · Viewed 137.6k times · Source

I have a Java app which reads CSV files which have been created in Excel (e.g. 2007). Does anyone know what charset MS Excel uses to save these files in?

I would have guessed either:

  • windows-1255 (Cp1255)
  • ISO-8859-1
  • UTF8

but I am unable to decode extended chars (e.g. french accentuated letters) using either of these charset types.

Answer

devstuff picture devstuff · Oct 1, 2009

From memory, Excel uses the machine-specific ANSI encoding. So this would be Windows-1252 for a EN-US installation, 1251 for Russian, etc.

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