Converting XLSX to CSV with Perl while maintaining the encoding - excel

Question

I'm a BI developer working with perl scripts as my ETL - I receive data over email, take the file, parse it and push it into the DB.
Most of the files are CSV, but occasionally I have an XLSX file.
I've been using Spreadsheet::XLSX to convert, but I've noticed that the CSV output comes out with the wrong encoding (needs to be UTF8, because accents and foreign languages).
That's the sub I'm using ($input_file is an Excel file), but I keep getting the data with the wrong characters.
WHAT am I missing?
Thanks a lot all!
sub convert_to_csv {
my $input_file = $_[0];
my ( $filename, $extension ) = split( '\.', $input_file );
open( format_file, ">:**encoding(utf-8)**", "$filename.csv" ) or die "could not open out file $!\n";
my $excel = Spreadsheet::XLSX->new($input_file);
my $line;
foreach my $sheet ( #{ $excel->{Worksheet} } ) {
#printf( "Sheet: %s\n", $sheet->{Name} );
$sheet->{MaxRow} ||= $sheet->{MinRow};
foreach my $row ( $sheet->{MinRow} .. $sheet->{MaxRow} ) {
$sheet->{MaxCol} ||= $sheet->{MinCol};
foreach my $col ( $sheet->{MinCol} .. $sheet->{MaxCol} ) {
my $cell = $sheet->{Cells}[$row][$col];
if ($cell) {
my $trimcell;
$trimcell = $cell->value();
print STDERR "cell: $trimcell\n"; ## Just for the tests so I don't have to open the file to see if it's ok
$trimcell =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g; ## Just to make sure I don't have extra spaces
$line .= "\"" . $trimcell . "\",";
}
}
chomp($line);
if ($line =~ /Grand Total/){} ##customized for the files
else {
print format_file "$line\n";
$line = '';
}
}
}
close format_file;
}

Answer 1

My knowledge is from using ETL::Pipeline and it uses Spreadsheet::XLSX for reading .xlsx-files.
But I know which fields are UTF-8
I wrote a Local ETL::Pipeline module to handle output for Excel files
use Encode qw(decode encode);
$ra_rec->{name} = decode( 'UTF-8', $ra_rec->{name}, Encode::FB_CROAK );