PHPEXCEL how to get cell value even with special characters
<p>When i get the cell value using the function getValue(), it returns false if the cell contains special characters, is there any solution to get the content, even if contains non UTF-8 characters? I'm looking to parse them before call the getValue() function. I will appreciate any kind of help.  </p>

<pre><code>$objPHPExcel = $objReader-&gt;load($filename);
        $objWorksheet = $objPHPExcel-&gt;getActiveSheet();
        $i=0;
        $record = array();

        foreach ($objWorksheet-&gt;getRowIterator() as $row) 
        {
            $cellIterator = $row-&gt;getCellIterator();
            $cellIterator-&gt;setIterateOnlyExistingCells(false);
            foreach ($cellIterator as $cell)
            {
                $val = $cell-&gt;getValue();
                // $val returns false or empty string ('') when the cell has special characters like ñ or another one
                $record[$i][] = $val;
            }
            $i++;
            if($i==$vueltas )
                return $record;
        }
        return $record;
    }
</code></pre>

<p>I tried with utf8_decode function and str_replace to parse the special characters but nothing happen, it still returning false. I think that is a reader problem but i can't find the code that manage it. </p>

<p>Thanks for the help!</p>