How to read EXCEL XLSX file with string values in iOS?

Question

I've been searching all over the internet for hours and hours and I've tried so many solutions but I'm never succeeding with this problem. So, basically, I'm a java-student developer and trying to create an app for both android and iOS. In Android, everything just works perfectly, if you ever find a problem, EASY PEASY! No problem to find solutions. But for iOS? Well.. I bet you know the answer! It's so damn hard to get things together and work properly.

Tried multiple libraries from git, all of them gives me an error since there either only can handle integers or there's problem with something else. None of these guides however seems to work well with my brain.

What I wonder is if somebody could give me a code-snippet or somehow a guide on how to just read an xls/xlsx/csv file and save the values into an array. I have two columns and would like to save them into two different arrays. The Excel file contains thousands of coordinates, so one array for latitude and one array for longitude.

Hope somebody have a tip or sort of solution for this!

Thanks

Answer 1

I would go in excel and convert your xslx file into a csv file. Then I’d try this library: https://github.com/yaslab/CSV.swift/blob/master/README.md

From the documentation on this library, it handles strings.

On that github page there are multiple ways to generate this array (either the csv as a Swift string or a file). This is the example for a file from that GitHub repo:

import CSV

let csvString = "1,foo\n2,bar"
let csv = try! CSVReader(string: csvString)
while let row = csv.next() {
    print("\(row)")
}
// => ["1", "foo"]
// => ["2", "bar"]

A 2-d array would be natural for this (if you’re still set on two separate arrays, see the edit at the end) Check out this answer for how it would work (code from top answer below): Swift append to 2d array

private var cards = [[Int]]()

init() {
     //Fill cards array by adding all cards
     for i in 0...12{
         for x in 0...3{
            cards.append([i+2,x])
        }
     }
 }

So basically your code you’d need to mix the first and second code snippets in this answer. Declare the array(s), then use the csv library as in one of the examples on the README page, then use Swift’s append function to add the latitude and longitude coordinates (you’d do this on the line replacing print("(row)") in the first example).

I have not personally tried this GitHub repo but based on the issues that have been raised and stars my guess is it should work.

Best of luck!

Edit: just realized you wanted two different arrays. In that case you’ll just declare two string arrays and instead of the print("(row)") from the first code snippet you’ll append latitude to one array and longitude to another array as seen in the second code snippet.