PHP Excel. Problem with encoding Russian characters

Question

ASCII

There was an encoding problem. When reading from cells, $cell->getValue() returns an ASCII string, so question marks appear where Cyrillic was. Since dancing with locales and recoding the resulting string does not give a result, the question is: where and what to twist in PHPExcel itself?

PS: I'm not special in PHP or in encodings, please treat the question indulgently.

Answer 1

the question is removed, the root is in the encoding of the document :)

Answer 2

With a file in Excel95 format (specifically, in the case of the created 1c 7.7), the problem is solved as it turned out in an elementary way :)
echo iconv('cp1251','utf-8', iconv('',"latin1", $text));

Answer 3

Try this
$validLocale = PHPExcel_Settings::setLocale('ru');
before creating the object
$objReader = new PHPExcel_Reader_Excel5();