How to read and write excel file

Question

I want to read and write an Excel file from Java with 3 columns and N rows, printing one string in each cell. Can anyone give me simple code snippet for this? Do I need to

Answer 1

If you need to do anything more with office documents in Java, go for POI as mentioned.

For simple reading/writing an excel document like you requested, you can use the CSV format (also as mentioned):

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class CsvWriter {
 public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException {

  String fileName = "test.xls";

  PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(fileName));
  out.println("a,b,c,d");
  out.println("e,f,g,h");
  out.println("i,j,k,l");
  out.close();

  BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
  String line = null;
  while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {

   Scanner scanner = new Scanner(line);
   String sep = "";
   while (scanner.hasNext()) {
    System.out.println(sep + scanner.next());
    sep = ",";
   }
  }
  in.close();
 }
}