title: Convert from Codepage 1252 (Windows) to Java, in Java
body: <p>I have some strings in Java (originally from an Excel sheet) that I presume are in Windows 1252 codepage. I want them converted to Javas own unicode format. The Excel file was parsed using the JXL package, in case that matter.</p>
  
  <p>I will clarify: apparently the strings gotten from the Excel file look pretty much like it already is some kind of unicode.</p>
  
  <pre><code>WorkbookSettings ws = new WorkbookSettings();
  ws.setCharacterSet(someInteger);
  Workbook workbook = Workbook.getWorkbook(new File(filename), ws);
  Sheet s = workbook.getSheet(sheet); 
  row = s.getRow(4);
  String contents = row[0].getContents();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is where contents seems to contain something unicode, the åäö are multibyte characters, while the ASCII ones are normal single byte characters. It is most definitely not Latin1. If I print the "contents" string with printLn and redirect it to a hello.txt file, I find that the letter "ö" is represented with two bytes, C3 B6 in hex. (195 and 179 in decimal.)</p>
  
  <p>[edit]</p>
  
  <p>I have tried the suggestions with different codepages etc given below, tried converting from Cp1252 etc. There was some kind of conversion, because I would get some other kind of gibberish instead. As reference I always printed an "ö" string hand coded into the source code, to verify that there was not something wrong with my terminal or typefaces or anything. The manually typed "ö" always worked.</p>
  
  <p>[edit]</p>
  
  <p>I also tried WorkBookSettings as suggested in the comments, but I looked in the code for JXL and characterSet seems to be ignored by parsing code. I think the parsing code just looks at whatever encoding the XLS file is supposed to be in.</p>