jruby-poi

This little gem provides an alternative interface to the Apache POI java library, for JRuby. For now the API is targeted at wrapping spreadsheets. We may expand this in the future.

INSTALL

gem install jruby-poi

USAGE

It's pretty simple really, create a POI::Workbook and access its sheets, rows, and cells. You can read from the spreadsheet, save it (as the filename with which you created or as a new spreadsheet via Workbook#save_as).

require 'poi'

# given an Excel spreadsheet whose first sheet (Sheet 1) has this data:
#    A  B  C  D  E        
# 1  4     A     2010-01-04
# 2  3     B     =DATE(YEAR($E$1), MONTH($E$1), A2)
# 3  2     C     =DATE(YEAR($E$1), MONTH($E$1), A3)
# 4  1     D     =DATE(YEAR($E$1), MONTH($E$1), A4)

workbook = POI::Workbook.open('spreadsheet.xlsx')
sheet = workbook.worksheets["Sheet 1"]
rows  = sheet.rows

# get a cell's value -- returns the value as its proper type, evaluating formulas if need be
rows[0][0].value # => 4.0
rows[0][1].value # => nil
rows[0][2].value # => 'A'
rows[0][3].value # => nil
rows[0][4].value # => 2010-01-04 as a Date instance
rows[1][4].value # => 2010-01-03 as a Date instance
rows[2][4].value # => 2010-01-02 as a Date instance
rows[3][4].value # => 2010-01-01 as a Date instance

# you can access a cell in array style as well... these snippets are all equivalent
workbook.sheets[0][2][2]          # => 'C'
workbook[0][2][2]                 # => 'C'
workbook.sheets['Sheet 1'][2][2]  # => 'C'
workbook['Sheet 1'][2][2]         # => 'C'

# you can access a cell in 3D cell format too
workbook['Sheet 1!A1']            # => 4.0

# you can even refer to ranges of cells
workbook['Sheet 1!A1:A3']         # => [4.0, 3.0, 2.0]

# if cells E1 - E4 were a named range, you could refer to those cells by its name
# eg. if the cells were named "dates"...
workbook['dates']                 # => dates from E1 - E4

# to get the Cell instance, instead of its value, just use the Workbook#cell method
workbook.cell('dates')            # => cells that contain dates from E1 to E4
workbook['Sheet 1!A1:A3']         # => cells that contain 4.0, 3.0, and 2.0

There's a formatted version of this code here, but Github doesn't allow embedding script tags in Markdown. Go figure!

TODO

fix reading ODS files -- we have a broken spec for this in io_spec.rb
add APIs for updating cells in a spreadsheet
create API for non-spreadsheet files
rdocs
tutorials, and/or better samples

Contributors

Note on Patches/Pull Requests