HSSF

Hi,

I hope I can post programmers issues about HSSF here. If not, where
can I go to?

I am a novice and try to understand how HSSF works.

When I try to read an excel cell that is not empty, it works fine as
far as the content is not a date, in which case I get an number back.

When I try to read an empty cell , I get the exception:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at com.ms.util.POIExcelReader.main(POIExcelReader.java:37)

Hereby my testcode:

<snip>
import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.*;

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class POIExcelReader{

    public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
        InputStream myxls = new FileInputStream("test.xls");
        HSSFWorkbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook(myxls);
        HSSFSheet blad = wb.getSheetAt(0);
        HSSFRow rij = blad.getRow(3);
        HSSFCell cel = rij.getCell((short) 4); // this cell is empty

    switch(cel.getCellType()) {
// what is wrong with the following??
    case HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_BLANK:
     System.out.println("EMPTY");
        break;
      case HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_STRING:
        System.out.println(cel.getStringCellValue());
        break;
      case HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC:
       if(HSSFDateUtil.isCellDateFormatted(cel)) {
     //this doesn't work !!
         System.out.println("Date :" + cel.getDateCellValue());
        }
        else {
          System.out.println("Number: " + cel.getNumericCellValue
());
        }
        break;
      case HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_BOOLEAN:
        System.out.println(cel.getBooleanCellValue());
        break;
      case HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_FORMULA:
        System.out.println(cel.getCellFormula());
        break;

      default:
        System.out.println();
        }

    }
}
</snip>

Thanks,