Accessing Date columns from Excel worksheets

[Rajkamal Pillai]

Hello,

I am using Apache POI to read data from Excel worksheets. The defined types of cell are STRING, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, BLANK, FORMULA and ERROR. When accessing a date column I think POI computes the date field eg. 12/12/2000 and returns a decimal value and the type of this column is NUMERIC. How do I get the exact contents as a STRING without any mathematical operation (division) being performed?

Thanks,
Rajkamal.

[Ulf Dittmer]

This sounds odd. If the cell type is text in the original file, then POI should recognize it as such (i.e, as STRING). What type of cell does Excel think it is?

[Rajkamal Pillai]

Sorry, I got caught up in a few things so was not checking the forum.

I finally figured it out. Sample code :

if(cell != null
          && (cell.getCellType() == HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC){

   // Check for a Date value.
   if(HSSFDateUtil.isValidExcelDate(cell.getNumericCellValue())) {

Date date = cell.getDateCellValue();
   }
}

This means even if its a date column its intepreted possibly as a numeric one and then you can check further if its a date type.

Thanks,
Rajkamal.