How to get an Excel Blank Cell Value in Apache POI?

Question

I have a huge excel file with tons of columns which looks like this :-

Column1 Column2 Column3 Column4 Column5
abc             def             ghi
        mno             pqr
......

This is the code that I wrote to print these values:

try {
    FileInputStream inputStr = new FileInputStream(fileName);
    XSSFWorkbook xssfWork = new XSSFWorkbook(inputStr) ;
    XSSFSheet sheet1 = xssfWork.getSheetAt(0);
    Iterator rowItr = sheet1.rowIterator();

    while ( rowItr.hasNext() ) {
        XSSFRow row = (XSSFRow) rowItr.next();
        System.out.println("ROW:-->");
        Iterator cellItr = row.cellIterator();

        while ( cellItr.hasNext() ) {
            XSSFCell cell = (XSSFCell) cellItr.next();
            System.out.println("CELL:-->"+cell.toString());
        }
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

The output generated by this code is :-

ROW:-->
CELL:-->Column1
CELL:-->Column2
CELL:-->Column3
CELL:-->Column4
CELL:-->Column5
ROW:-->
CELL:-->abc
CELL:-->def
CELL:-->ghi
ROW:-->
CELL:-->mno
CELL:-->pqr

So, If we look at the output above we can note that the cells where I left blank values was not picked up by the POI library , is there a way in which I can get these values as null. or a way to recognize that the values presented skipped blank cells?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you want to get all cells, no matter if they exist or not, then the iterator isn't for you. Instead, you need to manually fetch the appropriate cells, likely with a missing cell policy

for(Row row : sheet) {
   for(int cn=0; cn<row.getLastCellNum(); cn++) {
       // If the cell is missing from the file, generate a blank one
       // (Works by specifying a MissingCellPolicy)
       Cell cell = row.getCell(cn, Row.MissingCellPolicy.CREATE_NULL_AS_BLANK);
       // Print the cell for debugging
       System.out.println("CELL: " + cn + " --> " + cell.toString());
   }
}

There's more details on all of this in the Apache POI documentation on iterating over cells