Arabic / Other languages POI Excel Writing

I have been trying to export data with Arabic characters into excel sheet using
POI, but just get junk characters as below

#F' EF #-/ 9ED'! (FC 'D%E'1'* /(J 'DH7FJ H#1 'D'3*A3'1 9F

Any suggestions/examples on this please?

sample code below

<cfimport taglib="./poi/" prefix="poi" />

<cfset variable.fname="FILES\Cdr-#DATEFORMAT(now(),'DD-MM-YY')#.xls">

<cfsilent>

<poi:document file="#ExpandPath( variable.fname )#"

style=" font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt ; color: black ; whitespace: nowrap ; ">



<poi:classes>

<poi:class

name="title"

style="font-family: Arial ; color: white ; background-color: black ; font-size: 18pt ; text-align: center ;"

/>



<poi:class

name="header"

style="font-family: Arial ; background-color: green ; color: white ; font-size: 14pt ;"

/>

<poi:class

name="header2"

style="font-family: Arial ; background-color: red ; color: white ; font-size: 12pt ;"

/>

<poi:sheets>

<poi:sheet name="report1" style="margin-left:0.5; margin-right:0.5;">

<poi:columns>

<poi:column style="text-align: left ; width:200px ;" />

<poi:column style="text-align: left ; width:100px ;" />

<poi:column style="text-align: left ; width:500px;" />

<poi:column style="text-align: left ; width:300px ;" />



</poi:columns>



<!--- <poi:row >

<poi:cell type="string" value="" colspan="4"/>

</poi:row> --->



<poi:row >

<poi:cell value="Account" />

<poi:cell value="Name" />

<poi:cell value="Balance" />

</poi:row>



<cfloop query="info">

<poi:row >

<poi:cell type="string" value="#gfcpnc#" />

<poi:cell type="string" value="#g3nm1#" />

<poi:cell type="string" value="#g3nm1a#" />

</poi:row>

</cfloop>



</poi:sheet>

</poi:sheets>

</poi:document>

</cfsilent>

Sorry, I've never used the POI JSP tag library. If you just display the content on a web page (and not in an Excel file), do the right characters show up?

yes they do, even in PDF using cfdocument

OK then I'd say that means it is an encoding issue either in POI or in the Excel file. I'd see if you can find anything on specifying the encoding in POI. I've never needed to write anything other than English characters so that's just a guess, but it sounds like its not creating it with UTF-8 encoding.

I tried doing that before I posted my question, the forum was my last resort. Couldn't find anything

i just got back to this issue today and found out after some research that upgrading your POI to a newer version (say 3.7) will solve the problem at hand.