From: Bret Pettichord <bret@...>
Date: 2005-09-08T14:03:06+09:00
Subject: WIN32OLE doesn't seem to support UTF-8.

Has anyone been able to use WIN32OLE with international characters?

I would like to access international text from Excel and Explorer using 
WIN32OLE. But whenever i do this in Ruby, i get "????????". (This code 
works fine for English).

   data = $sheet.cells(1, 'b').value
   $sheet.cells(2, 'b').value = data

I'm pretty sure this is a Ruby problem, because the equivalent script in 
VBA works fine.

  Set From = Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(1, "b")
  Set Target = Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(2, "b")
  Target.Value = From.Value

I've been testing this with UTF-8 encoded Japanese text, although i am 
hoping to find a general solution (not specific to any code-page).

When i looked through the Ruby code (win32ole.c) and it seems that string 
return values are being passed through this function:

static LPWSTR
ole_mb2wc(pm, len)
     char *pm;
     int  len;
{
     int size;
     LPWSTR pw;
     size = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, pm, len, NULL, 0);
     pw = SysAllocStringLen(NULL, size - 1);
     MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, pm, len, pw, size);
     return pw;
}

"The MultiByteToWideChar function maps a character string to a 
wide-character (Unicode) string. The character string mapped by this 
function is not necessarily from a multibyte character."

I don't really understand what is happening here. It seems to me that both 
the input and output strings have to have their encoding specified here. 
Here ANSI is hard-coded (CP_ACP) but i don't know if this is for input or 
output.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/unicode_17si.asp

I'd appreciate any insight into this matter that you might have. I've spent 
a couple days reading up on UTF-8 and Unicode, but don't really have any 
experience with these things.

I am using 1.8.2-15

Bret


_____________________
  Bret Pettichord
  www.pettichord.com