Retrieval of Information from Excel Sheet using JDBC-ODBC

Question

Hello,
Currently I am writing a program that extracts information fromexcel sheet. This excel sheet have some values in Chinese. I am able to extract English character from the different column in excel, but if some column contain chineese valur then it prints ???. After that I looked on net and found some details in to convert Big5 (Chinese) character into unicode, but this is not working and in that case nothing is displayed. I am attaching the my code. In my code the 'customer' field contain chinese character.
import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.sql.*;
public class ExcelJDBC
     Connection con;
     Statement stmt;
     public ExcelJDBC(String url)
          try
               Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
          catch(java.lang.ClassNotFoundException e)
               System.err.print("ClassNotFoundException: ");
               System.err.println(e.getMessage());
          try
               con = DriverManager.getConnection(url, "", "");
               stmt = con.createStatement();
          catch(SQLException ex)
               System.out.println("SQL EXCEPTION OCCURED");
               System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
               ex.printStackTrace();
     public void sql(String sql)
          try
               stmt.execute(sql);
          catch(SQLException ex)
               System.out.println("SQL EXCEPTION OCCURED");
               System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
               ex.printStackTrace();
     public void closeAll()
          try
               stmt.close();
               con.close();
          catch(SQLException ex)
               System.out.println("SQL EXCEPTION OCCURED");
               System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
               ex.printStackTrace();
     //big5 to unicode conversion
     private String b2u(String str2convert) throws IOException
          System.out.println("The input string is :" + str2convert);
          StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
          byte[] targetBytes = str2convert.getBytes();
          ByteArrayInputStream stream = new ByteArrayInputStream(targetBytes);
          InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(stream,"Big5");
          Reader in = new BufferedReader(isr);
          int chInt;
          while((chInt = in.read()) < -1)
               buffer.append((char)chInt);
          in.close();
          System.out.println("The output string is :" + buffer.toString());
          return buffer.toString();
     public void sqlQuery(String sql)
          try
               ResultSet rc = stmt.executeQuery(sql);
               if(rc != null)
                    int count = 0;
                    while (rc.next())
                         String value = "";
                         value = b2u(rc.getString("workorder"));
                         System.out.println("The workorder is : "+value);
                         String customer = rc.getString("Customer");
                         value = b2u(customer);
                         System.out.println("The Customer is : "+value);
                         count++;
                    System.out.println("Entering in loop " count " time.\n");
          catch(SQLException ex)
               System.out.println("SQL EXCEPTION OCCURED");
               System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
               ex.printStackTrace();
          catch(IOException ex)
               System.out.println("IO EXCEPTION OCCURED");
               System.err.println("IOException: " + ex.getMessage());
               ex.printStackTrace();
public static void main(String[] args)
     String url = "jdbc:odbc:detailsdsn";     
     try
          ExcelJDBC ej = new ExcelJDBC(url);
          ej.sqlQuery("SELECT \"workorder\", \"Customer\" FROM \"Sheet1$\"");
          ej.closeAll();
     catch(Exception ex)
          System.out.println("SQL EXCEPTION OCCURED");
          System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage());
          ex.printStackTrace();
I will highly appriciate any answer of my problem.
Regards,
Ruchi

Answer 1

Try to find out, what characters really are in your string customer.
I assume you used System.out.print..(), when you got them as '?'.
Find out which unicodes they are!
Afterwards I see two possibilites:
Either
1) you see real unicodes for Chinese characters, and it was only the unability of System.out to print them others than as '?', then you can convert these characters however you want. Maybe your further processing can handle them directly as unicode.
or
2) you get really '?' in your string. Then Excel (or JDBC or ODBC or ???) hasn't been able to transmit these Chinese characters to your program others than converting them all into '?'. Then you are lost, because you can't know which Chinese character each '?' originally could have been.
Hope this helps.
Please tell us, which you experienced, 1) or 2).