POI Converting Long Number to Sciebtific Notarion

[Pat Flickner]

To start off, I Googled this and couldn't find any good answer; most of the time, the questioner never received a response or they were told to go to the Apache POI website, and I couldn't find any answers there, either. I am uploading a spreadsheet and processing it through a Java program using Apache POI.

The problem I've encountered is that we have a column called source_cd that can contain any 10-character combination of numbers and characters. The issue we have comes into play when a user enters all numbers for a cell in this column. POI is converting the number to scientific notation, so a number like 1234567890 becomes 1.29532E9. I know the work-around is to put a tic in front of the number to force it to be read as text, but we don't want the users to have to do this. A number, even if treated as a double, should be read as a number and not converted. Is there any way to force this?

Thanks very much for any help.

[Ulf Dittmer]

To ask the obvious: Is the cell type set to string (and not to number)?

[Pat Flickner]

It is general formatting, so POI automatically reads a number as a numeric field because even if it's general format, Excel automatically converts numbers not specifically formatted as text (read the tic (') mark) as numeric fields. So yes, it is a numeric field if there's a number in it. And if it's a number, POI treats it as a double regardless of its actual state.

[Pat Flickner]

Figured it out -- I don't know why it never occurred to anyone, but I created a long variable and cast the cell as a long. That did the trick. Simplest solution. Son of a gun.

long sciNotationBypass = (long) cell.getNumericCellValue();

Worked like a charm.

I'm beginning to get why they call me Merlin.