PHPExcel how to solve encoding problem while reading a file

Question

I was working on the Yii2 API, where I need to download a .csv or .xlsx file and read it using PHPExcel (now DEPRECATED, but I am stuck in it since the new one for PhpSpreadsheet requires PHP version 5.6 or later) and returns an array of data.

This was the code used in the API function.

public function actionUpload()
{
    $params = $_FILES['uploadFile'];
    if($params)
    {
        $data = array();
        $model = new UploadForm();
        $model->uploadFile = $_FILES['uploadFile'];
        $file =  UploadedFile::getInstanceByname('uploadFile');
        $inputFileName = $model->getpath($file,$data);
        //  Read your Excel workbook
        try
        {
            $inputFileType = \PHPExcel_IOFactory::identify($inputFileName['link']);
            $objReader = \PHPExcel_IOFactory::createReader($inputFileType);
            if($inputFileType == 'CSV')
            {   


                if (mb_check_encoding(file_get_contents($inputFileName['link']), 'UTF-8'))
                {
                    $objReader->setInputEncoding('UTF-8');
                }
                else
                {
                     $objReader->setInputEncoding('Windows-1255');
                     //$objReader->setInputEncoding('ISO-8859-8');
                }


            }
            $objPHPExcel = $objReader->load($inputFileName['link']);
        }
        catch(Exception $e)
        {
            die('Error loading file "'.pathinfo($inputFileName['link'],PATHINFO_BASENAME).'": '.$e->getMessage());
        }

        //  Get worksheet dimensions
        $sheet = $objPHPExcel->getSheet(0); 
        $highestRow = $sheet->getHighestRow(); 
        $highestColumn = $sheet->getHighestColumn();
        $fileData = array();
        //  Loop through each row of the worksheet in turn
        for ($row = 1; $row <= $highestRow; $row++)
        { 
            //  Read a row of data into an array
            $rowData = $sheet->rangeToArray('A' . $row . ':' . $highestColumn . $row,
                                            NULL,
                                            TRUE,
                                            FALSE);
            array_push($fileData,$rowData[0]);
            //  Insert row data array into your database of choice here
        }
        return $fileData;
    }

}

But there are encoding problems when we upload an excel file containing Hebrew data. As you can see, the code below from the code above was used to solve this problem.

if (mb_check_encoding(file_get_contents($inputFileName['link']), 'UTF-8'))
{
    $objReader->setInputEncoding('UTF-8');
}
else
{
        $objReader->setInputEncoding('Windows-1255');

}

, UTF-8 Windows-1255 , , , UTF-16 , . , mb_check_encoding

, , :

iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string

, - . ?

Answer 1

, :

ob_end_clean();
header( "Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel" );
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="uploadFile.xls"');
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
ob_end_clean();