Read Date values from Excel Sheet (Java)

Question

I've a Java code which displays the contents of excel sheet. Now, when i'm working with numeric/string/boolean data it always gives me right result. Unlike, for testing my code i made few changes in the Excel and added a date value for example 4-sep-09. On running my code, it returned undesired results. Code and the o/p is shown as follows. How i can read and display date values from excel sheet? I'm using Apache Poi. I could have done something like XSSFDateUtil and check if the cell value is date or not using if-else? is that a possible solution?

Java Code:

FileInputStream file = new FileInputStream(new File(FileName));
       System.out.println("The contents of sheet are:\n");
       XSSFWorkbook workbook = new XSSFWorkbook(file);
       XSSFSheet sheet = workbook.getSheetAt(0);
       Iterator<Row> rowIterator = sheet.iterator();
       while(rowIterator.hasNext()) {
           Row row = rowIterator.next(); 
           Iterator<Cell> cellIterator = row.cellIterator();
           while(cellIterator.hasNext()) {
               Cell cell = cellIterator.next();
               switch(cell.getCellType()) {
                   case Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC:
                       System.out.print(cell.getNumericCellValue() + "\t\t");
                       break;
                   case Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING:
                       System.out.print(cell.getStringCellValue() + "\t\t");
                       break;
               }
           }
           System.out.println("");
       }    
       file.close();

O/P i'm getting

ColA   | ColB....(few other columns)
32755.0|(other values)

Instead what i want that date value must be printed instead of number. My sheet is having 4-SEP-89 date under ColA and it is displaying some numbers.

Desired O/P

ColA    | ColB....(few other columns)
4-SEP-89|(other values)

Note:- this is part of my code, which is running fine. Its giving no errors, however i need small change in the o/p as asked above. i've been working on this for a while. i've asked questions related to displaying excel sheets before here- Issue while reading Excel document (Java code) which is resolved along with couple of others. Thanks anyway.

Also, as far as i think, everything from excel, is read as a String (except boolean values)? Isn't that right?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 27 '12 at 13:41

4

You may want to look at DateUtil.isCellDateFormatted()

DateUtil is a utility class that helps you deal with excel dates. It also has methods to get the Java Date from the double you get from the Cell

answered Dec 27 '12 at 13:41

bowmore

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my file is in Excel 2007 so i'm using XSSF instead of HSSF and cannot find XSSFDateUtil – Vinayak Pahalwan Dec 27 '12 at 13:46
They're static methods on UtilDate so they're also accessible on HSSFUtilDate (a subclass of UtilDate). So it probably wouldn't have mattered much. – bowmore Dec 27 '12 at 13:51

Read Date values from Excel Sheet (Java)

1 Answers1