title: PHPEXCEL how to get cell value even with special characters
body: <p>When i get the cell value using the function getValue(), it returns false if the cell contains special characters, is there any solution to get the content, even if contains non UTF-8 characters? I'm looking to parse them before call the getValue() function. I will appreciate any kind of help.  </p>
  
  <pre><code>$objPHPExcel = $objReader-&gt;load($filename);
          $objWorksheet = $objPHPExcel-&gt;getActiveSheet();
          $i=0;
          $record = array();
  
          foreach ($objWorksheet-&gt;getRowIterator() as $row) 
          {
              $cellIterator = $row-&gt;getCellIterator();
              $cellIterator-&gt;setIterateOnlyExistingCells(false);
              foreach ($cellIterator as $cell)
              {
                  $val = $cell-&gt;getValue();
                  // $val returns false or empty string ('') when the cell has special characters like ñ or another one
                  $record[$i][] = $val;
              }
              $i++;
              if($i==$vueltas )
                  return $record;
          }
          return $record;
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried with utf8_decode function and str_replace to parse the special characters but nothing happen, it still returning false. I think that is a reader problem but i can't find the code that manage it. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks for the help!</p>