title: how to get unicode string from excel
body: <p>Hi i am using ExcelFormat Library to extract some content from a excel file (.xls) which it contains some unicode characters here is the code</p>
  
  <pre><code>BasicExcel xls(from);
  
  XLSFormatManager fmt_mgr(xls);
  BasicExcelWorksheet* sheet = xls.GetWorksheet(0);
  
  CellFormat fmt_general(fmt_mgr);
  
  fmt_general.set_format_string("0.000");
  
  for (int y = 0; y&lt;2; ++y) {
      for (int x = 0; x&lt;2; ++x) {
  
          BasicExcelCell* cell = sheet-&gt;Cell(y, x);
  
          cout &lt;&lt; sheet-&gt;Cell(y, x)-&gt;GetWString();
  
          CellFormat fmt(fmt_mgr, cell);
  
          const Workbook::Font&amp; font = fmt_mgr.get_font(fmt);
          string font_name = stringFromSmallString(font.name_);
  
          const wstring&amp; fmt_string = fmt.get_format_string();
  
          cell-&gt;SetFormat(fmt_general);
  
          cout &lt;&lt; endl;
      }
  }
  
  cout &lt;&lt; "write: " &lt;&lt; from &lt;&lt; endl;
  xls.SaveAs(to);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>this code works well and it copies the excel file correctly with unicode characters but before saving data to the new file i need to do some operations on it if the string wasn't in unicode i could use this</p>
  
  <pre><code>sheet-&gt;Cell(y, x)-&gt;GetString();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and it works fine but when i have unicode data i can not read it even with</p>
  
  <pre><code>sheet-&gt;Cell(y, x)-&gt;GetWString();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>because it returns some number and i can't work with it how should i convert the result of GetWstring to appropriate text format</p>