使用Apache POI保留excel单元格值的单引号前缀

Question

Currently i am reading excel value from my sheet But its neglecting " ' " in cell value

Expected output- 'Testing
Actual output  -  Testing

How to display the single qoute while reading from excel

package utils;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.CellStyle;
import org.apache.poi.xssf.usermodel.XSSFCellStyle;
import org.apache.poi.xssf.usermodel.XSSFSheet;
import org.apache.poi.xssf.usermodel.XSSFWorkbook;

public class ExcelDataConfig {

    XSSFWorkbook wb;
    XSSFSheet sheet1;

    public ExcelDataConfig(String excelPath) throws IOException {
        File src = new File(excelPath);
        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(src);
        wb = new XSSFWorkbook(fis);
        
        
    }

    public String getData(int sheetNumber, int row, int column) {
        sheet1 = wb.getSheetAt(sheetNumber);
        String data = sheet1.getRow(row).getCell(column).getStringCellValue();
        return data;

    }
}

My test class

ExcelDataConfig excel = new ExcelDataConfig(System.getProperty("user.dir") + "/src/test/resources/testData/TestData.xlsx");
System.out.println("String with double quotes=" +excel.getData(0, 0, 0));

    

Answer 1

A leading single quote character ' is a special character in Excel, which tells it to treat it's contents verbatim. The most common use I know of is to tell it not to format numerical values by removing leading zeroes.

When you enter a value into Excel that is prefixed with ' , note how the quote only appears in the editing field, not in the cell as it is displayed in the sheet.

Behind the scenes the quotePrefix value is stored separately from the value itself. For example, setting 'Testing will result in the value being just Testing , with quotePrefix=true in the OOXML.

So technical, so good, POI reports the value correctly, by giving you exactly what Excel shows as the value, namely just Testing . To make the single quotation mark appear in POI, access the property CellStyle.getQuotePrefixed() and add it manually.

So in your example you could try:

Cell cell = sheet1.getRow(row).getCell(column);
String data = cell.getStringCellValue();
if(cell.getCellStyle().getQuotePrefixed()) {
    data = '''+data;
}
return data;

With this you might (depending on use-case) run into issues where sometimes you want the prefix and in other situations you don't, especially if you're not in control of the input Excel. Arguably it might be 'more correct' to escape the single quotation mark in Excel itself, by adding a second. So in Excel you would enter ''Testing . This would ensure that both Excel and POI report the desired value of 'Testing , without using the above code.

Answer 2

Yes it will neglect single quote as single quote in xls cell is actually a shortcut to accept data as it is. So if you are storing 'Hello Superman' then please store it as ''Hello Superman' and it will be read correctly as 'Hello Superman'