Character Encoding

[Neha Deshmukh]

What is the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode character encoding?

[Paul Sturrock]

Have a read of this.

[Neha Deshmukh]

Hey Thanks alot for this useful article.
Now I have one doubt.
I am exporting french characters from jsp to excel file with charset UTF-8.
response.setContentType("application/x-msexcel);
but in excel file it is showing block for some characters.
when I write
response.setContentType("application/x-msexcel;charset=Unicode"); all characters are displayed perfectly in excel file.
So can you please explain this behaviour? I mean why it is not working for UTF-8 encoding and working properly for Unicode encoding.

[Ulf Dittmer]

The encoding is the same in both cases (UTF-8). The difference is that Excel by default does not seem to recognize Unicode, and only if it is explicitly told that it's being given Unicode data will it do the right thing.