Example: Unicode - Polish in UTF-8

This program is an example of reading in data from a UTF-8 encoded text file and converting it to a worksheet.

The main trick is to ensure that the data read in is converted to UTF-8 within the Python program. The XlsxWriter module will then take care of writing the encoding to the Excel file.

##############################################################################
#
# A simple example of converting some Unicode text to an Excel file using
# the XlsxWriter Python module.
#
# This example generates a spreadsheet with some Polish text from a file
# with UTF8 encoded text.
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause
#
# Copyright (c) 2013-2025, John McNamara, jmcnamara@cpan.org
#
import xlsxwriter

# Open the input file with the correct encoding.
with open("unicode_polish_utf8.txt", mode="r", encoding="utf-8") as textfile:

    # Create an new Excel file and convert the text data.
    workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook("unicode_polish_utf8.xlsx")
    worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

    # Widen the first column to make the text clearer.
    worksheet.set_column("A:A", 50)

    # Start from the first cell.
    row = 0
    col = 0

    # Read the text file and write it to the worksheet.
    for line in textfile:
        # Ignore the comments in the text file.
        if line.startswith("#"):
            continue

        # Write any other lines to the worksheet.
        worksheet.write(row, col, line.rstrip("\n"))
        row += 1

    workbook.close()