Reading an XLS (Excel) file. Row by row.

[Jon Leghurts]

Howdy everyone,

I need to make a program that will read XLS files in this form: (rows seperated by a ';')
(first row)
Id student name;LockerNo;Combination;Teacher
(second row)
record1
(third row)
record2

and so on...

I need to be able to read a certain file to compare with an other (specifically to check for records that are in the first but not in the second).

Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea which libraries (if any exist) to use, could anyone suggest certain API to look through to get me started?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Ulf Dittmer]

What you describe looks like a CSV file, not like an XLS file (except that in CSVs, *columns* are separated by semi-colons, not *rows*).

The http://faq.javaranch.com/java/AccessingFileFormats page has links to lots of libraries that can read both CSV and XLS.