How to parse UTF-8 characters in Excel files using POI

Question

I have been using POI to parse XLS and XLSX files successfully. However, I am unable to correctly extract special characters, such as UTF-8 encoded characters like Chinese or Japanese, from an Excel spreadsheet. I have figured out how to extract data from a UTF-8 encoded csv or tab delimited file, but no luck with the Excel file. Can anyone help?

(Edit: Code snippet from comments)

HSSFSheet sheet = workbook.getSheet(worksheet); 
HSSFEvaluationWorkbook ewb = HSSFEvaluationWorkbook.create(workbook); 
while (rowCtr <= lastRow && !rowBreakOut) 
{ 
    Row row = sheet.getRow(rowCtr);//rows.next(); 
    for (int col=firstCell; col<lastCell && !breakOut; col++) { 
      Cell cell; 
      cell = row.getCell(col,Row.RETURN_BLANK_AS_NULL); 
      if (ctype == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) { 
         sValue = cell.getStringCellValue(); 
         log.warn("String value = "+sValue); 
         String encoded = URLEncoder.encode(sValue, "UTF-8"); 
         log.warn("URL-encoded with UTF-8: " + encoded); 
         ....

Answer 1

I had the same problem while extracting Persian text from an Excel file. I was using Eclipse, and simply going to Project -> Properties and changing the "text file encoding" to UTF-8 solved the problem.