js-codepage

> If we can put together an Apache2-licensed module in JS in an afternoon (https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage) it can be done in python. I thought Python 2 was Unicode-unfriendly. So not as easy as JS.

> how are the strings in excel encoded anyway? Length-prefixed byte arrays encoded using various code pages. There are a small number that excel uses: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage/blob/master/excel.csv (the columns are CP#, mapping, single/double-byte) > Does the language this library is written in support that translation? Are there modules to do that? Is the license for those module(s) necessary compatible? If we can put together an Apache2-licensed module in JS in an afternoon (https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage) it can be done in python. > Who's going to go through the different document versions to confirm, and adjust for the various encodings for non-ascii characters? Someone already did that: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files/tree/master/biff5 has artifacts for every language type

There are two types of formats generally recognized as XLS: Excel 5.0/95 "BIFF5" and Excel 97-2003 "BIFF8". The former uses a language-specific codepage like 1252 and the latter can use a language-specific codepage or the more general 1200 (UTF16LE). Here is the master list of codepages used by Excel: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage/blob/master/excel.csv (disclaimer: I built this as part of the in-browser XLS parser https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls)

Fun facts: - a few code pages (such as CP864 DOS Arabic) use the arabic percent sign ٪ (0x066A) at codepoint 0x25 instead of the standard ANSI %. - Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird approximate the Arabic codepages (including ASMO-708) to ISO-8869-6, which breaks XLS parsing from files generated from certain international versions of Excel (which actually forced me to build a library for the various character encodings: https://github.com/SheetJS/js-codepage)