Apache POI - Iterate Down a Single Column

Question

I'm still new with POI, but I want to simply iterate down a single column in an Excel Workbook. For instance in the table below if I just want the values of column A, which would be the rows 0-3 in column 0, is there an efficient way to do this? Everything with POI I have seen has been very row-based.

____A__________B______
1| some   |   some   |
2| sample |   other  |
3| text   |   stuff  |
4| here   |   here   |
______________________

I have a few spreadsheets that can be large, and I successfully can iterate through the whole sheet, but I'm just trying to figure out the best practice for handling something like this.

Thanks in advance.

What have You already tried, what is not working? Please provide a SSCCE. — Opal, Sep 04 '14 at 19:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

2

Unfortunately there is not column concept in apache POI because of the object model inherited from Excel so you have to iterate over the rows.

Here a possible duplicate with an example.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

Community

1
1

answered Sep 04 '14 at 20:19

felix at housecat

316
3
10

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 06 '18 at 05:47

Here's how you can do it

for(Row r : datatypeSheet) 
            {
                Iterator<Cell> headerIterator = r.cellIterator();
                Cell header = null;
// table header row
                if(r.getRowNum() == 0)
                {
                    //  getting specific column's index

                    while(headerIterator.hasNext())
                    {
                        header = headerIterator.next();
                        if(header.getStringCellValue().equalsIgnoreCase("A"))
                        {
                            AIndex = header.getColumnIndex();
                        }
                        else if(header.getStringCellValue().equalsIgnoreCase("B"))
                        {
                            BIndex = header.getColumnIndex();
                        }
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    Cell ACells = r.getCell(AIndex);
                    Cell BCells = r.getCell(BIndex);
                    if(ACells != null) 
                    {
                        if(ACells.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) 
                        {
                            AData.add(ACells.getStringCellValue());  //arraylist storing A's data
                        }
                    }
                    if(BCells != null) 
                    {
                        if(BCells.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) 
                        {
                            BData.add(BCells.getStringCellValue());  //arraylist storing B's data
                        }
                    }
                }
            }

Apache POI - Iterate Down a Single Column

2 Answers2