How to write German umlauts to a spreadsheet with xlsxwriter in Python

Question

I already tried this one, but when I open the Excel spreadsheet, the whole Excel file is blank. Is there another way?

import xlsxwriter

....
    sheet.write(1, 27, "Französisch".decode('latin1'), bold)

Answer 1

Excel, and XlsxWriter, use either ASCII or UTF-8. To write a string like that in Python 2:

1. Encode the file as UTF-8.
2. Include the "coding" directive at the start of the file.
3. Use u'' to indicate a Unicode string.

Like this:

# _*_ coding: utf-8

import xlsxwriter

workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('example.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

worksheet.write('B3', u'Französisch')

workbook.close()

In Python 3 you just need to encode the file as UTF-8.

See the Unicode examples in XlsxWriter docs.