How do I check if a cell contains a date value?

By Wayan Saryada in Apache POI 2 Comments

The code below check if the first cell of an Excel file contains a date value. In Excel the cell type for date is returned as HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC, to make sure if it contains a date we can use a utility method HSSFDateUtil.isCellDateFormatted(HSSFCell cell), this method will check if the cell value is a valid date.

package org.kodejava.example.poi;

import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFCell;
import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFDateUtil;
import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFSheet;
import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.CellType;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;

public class DateCellType {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String filename = "datecelltype.xls";

        try (FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(filename)) {
            HSSFWorkbook workbook = new HSSFWorkbook(fis);
            HSSFSheet sheet = workbook.getSheetAt(0);

            // Read a cell the first cell on the sheet.
            HSSFCell cell = sheet.getRow(0).getCell(0);
            if (cell.getCellTypeEnum() == CellType.NUMERIC) {
                System.out.println("Cell type for date data type is numeric.");
            }

            // Using HSSFDateUtil to check if a cell contains a date.
            if (HSSFDateUtil.isCellDateFormatted(cell)) {
                System.out.println("The cell contains a date value: " + cell.getDateCellValue());
            }
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

The example result of the code snippet:

Cell type for date data type is numeric.
The cell contains a date value: Wed Mar 01 17:36:59 WITA 2017

Maven Dependencies

<!-- http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/poi/poi/3.15/poi-3.15.jar -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi</artifactId>
    <version>3.15</version>
</dependency>

Wayan Saryada

Founder at Kode Java Org
I am a programmer, a runner, a recreational diver, currently live in the island of Bali, Indonesia. Mostly programming in Java, Spring Framework, Hibernate / JPA. You can support my works by donating here. Thank you 🥳

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2 Comments

  1. I have both numeric cells and date cells in my spreadsheet. When I read then using POI, all of them are identified as Date type. How can I differentiate between numeric values and date values?

    Reply 
  2. case Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC:
    if (HSSFDateUtil.isCellDateFormatted(cell)) {
        DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss");
        return df.format(cell.getDateCellValue());
    } else {
        DecimalFormat df = new DecimalFormat("##.###############");
        return df.format(cell.getNumericCellValue());
    }
    Reply

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