Can't decide between Date and Number cells

[2knu]

How can I decide if its a Date cell or just a number cell? I want to read different excel sheets, where I don't know which one is a date cell.

There is only a CellType Number and not a Date type. So I could try to read every number as Date, but than numbers will be read wrong for me, because they arent dates mostly.

So what I would expect is:

if (cell.getType() == CellType.Date)
{ cell.asDate(); }
else if(cell.getType() == CellType.Number)
{ cell.asNumber(); }
else 
{ cell.getText(); }

Would be nice when smt. like this will work :)

Originally posted by @2knu in https://github.com/dhatim/fastexcel/issues/91#issuecomment-631576315

[ochedru]

To achieve that, we would have to read the cell format (as replied in issue #91, date type does not exist) and apply complex checks (see DateUtil.isADateFormat()) to verify it is actually a date format. This is a lot of work.

[sebastian-raubach]

I think it is an essential feature to know whether a cell actually contains a date or a number. I only just realised this was an issue and am now seriously considering using a different library, because without this ability, I cannot use fastexcel anymore.

[lpyfm]

dates are stored internally in Excel as double values, so I don't think adding something like CellType.Date is possible.

With Apache POI, there's also no Date type, but there's the method org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.isCellDateFormatted, which tells you if a cell is formatted as date. It would be great if fastexcel provides something similar.