title: Using Perl to read French characters from an Excel spreadsheet
body: <p>I am using <a href="https://metacpan.org/module/Spreadsheet%3a%3aParseExcel" rel="noreferrer"><code>Spreadsheet::ParseExcel</code></a> to parse an Excel spreadsheet file as follows</p>
  
  <pre><code>my $FileName = "../excel.xls";
  my $parser   = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel-&gt;new();
  my $workbook = $parser-&gt;parse($FileName);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And reading values from the cells like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>$product = $worksheeto-&gt;get_cell( $row, 0 )-&gt;value();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is that, when there is a French character, for instance <code>à</code>, it shows <code>ò</code></p>
  
  <p>To be sure that the there is no error in the parsing I used</p>
  
  <pre><code>print unpack('H*', $product) . "\n";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So when I use any online hex to string converter I do get the <code>à</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I also tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>use utf8;
  binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but instead of <code>à</code> I get <code>+á</code></p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to get the correct characters?</p>