PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet · error · PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Exception

Code page $codePage not supported.

Error message

Code page $codePage not supported.

What it means

CodePage::numberToName() explicitly rejects code page 720 (DOS OEM Arabic) and 32769 with 'not supported' before attempting any mapping, because no unambiguous iconv encoding exists for them. Any string content in such a workbook is therefore unreadable by the Xls reader.

Source

Thrown at src/PhpSpreadsheet/Shared/CodePage.php:104

    {
        if (array_key_exists($codePage, self::$pageArray)) {
            $value = self::$pageArray[$codePage];
            if (is_array($value)) {
                foreach ($value as $encoding) {
                    if (@iconv('UTF-8', $encoding, ' ') !== false) {
                        self::$pageArray[$codePage] = $encoding;

                        return $encoding;
                    }
                }

                throw new PhpSpreadsheetException("Code page $codePage not implemented on this system.");
            } else {
                return $value;
            }
        }
        if ($codePage == 720 || $codePage == 32769) {
            throw new PhpSpreadsheetException("Code page $codePage not supported."); //    OEM Arabic
        }

        throw new PhpSpreadsheetException('Unknown codepage: ' . $codePage);
    }

    /** @return array<int, array<int, string>|string> */
    public static function getEncodings(): array
    {
        return self::$pageArray;
    }
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 65b080eef4)

Solutions

1. Re-save the file from LibreOffice/Excel choosing a modern encoding (UTF-8 or Windows-1256): libreoffice --headless --convert-to xlsx file.xls
2. If you must parse it, pre-convert the bytes yourself treating the code page as CP720 before handing the file over
3. Keep such files out of automated pipelines by validating the code page on ingest

// Reject/redirect unsupported legacy code pages at ingest
$fh = fopen($path, 'rb');
$head = fread($fh, 8); // OLE2 check D0 CF 11 E0 ...
fclose($fh);
if (substr(bin2hex($head), 0, 8) !== 'd0cf11e0') {
    throw new InvalidArgumentException('Not an OLE2 .xls file');
}

try {
    $spreadsheet = $reader->load($path);
} catch (\PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Exception $e) {
    if (str_contains($e->getMessage(), 'not supported')) {
        // CP720/32769: route file to LibreOffice conversion pipeline
    }
}

When it happens

Trigger: Loading an .xls whose CODEPAGE record is 720 — Arabic DOS-era files, typically from old accounting or POS software — or the internal 32769 value.

Common situations: Archived Arabic-region spreadsheets from the 1990s; exports from legacy Middle-East business systems; files passed through old conversion pipelines.

Related errors

• Unknown codepage: ${codepage}
• Code page $codePage not implemented on this system.
• Unknown codepage: $codePage
• Unable to get contents of $filename
• Unable to open php://memory

AI-assisted analysis of PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet@65b080eef4 (2026-08-17). Data as JSON: /api/errors/893faf5260b3a4d1. Report an issue: GitHub.