Description: ------------ If a Unicode string written to a worksheet contains any "surrogate pairs" then when it's opened in Excel an "unreadable content" error will occur and the data will not be displayed. The problem is in the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer_Worksheet::writeStringBIFF8() method where mb_strlen($str, 'UTF-16LE') is used to calculate the string's length. Apparently Excel expects Unicode string lengths to be the number of 16-bit code points, not the number of characters. Test script: --------------- require_once 'Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer.php'; $excel = new Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer(); $excel->setVersion(8); // Excel 97/2000 format, which allows Unicode characters $worksheet = $excel->addWorksheet('test'); $worksheet->setInputEncoding('UTF-8'); $utf8_string = html_entity_decode('𝄞', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'); // musical symbol G clef $result = $worksheet->writeString(0, 0, $utf8_string); $excel->send('test.xls'); $excel->close(); Expected result: ---------------- The worksheet should open in Excel without error, with a single (likely undisplayable) character in the first cell. Actual result: -------------- When opening the worksheet in Excel an "Excel found unreadable content" error occurs and no data is in the first cell.

I guess the HTML entity in my test script isn't being escaped when it's displayed here. That line should be: $utf8_string = html_entity_decode('𝄞', ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'); // musical symbol G clef

I have submitted a patch on GitHub: https://github.com/pear/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer/pull/1

The attached patch was merged. However, I still get corrupted files with the current version. I realized I was in fact hit by bug #19278. This bug only happens when using BIFF8 (Excel 97/2003). Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer uses an older format by default.

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