POI- Log file to xlsx -writing data in unreadable format and i think this is due to wrong encodeing

[Thakur Sachin Singh]

Hi All,

When I am trying to read data from BufferedReader and writing into excel using FileOutputStream object with POI APIs then i am getting the data in excel file in bad formats. you can check the log file and excel file attached for more information.

Here my problem is I cannot use BufferedWriter in place of FileOutputStream because POI class XSSFWorkbook only have one write method and we can only pass FileOutputStream class objet there.

Please have a look the code and suggest me how i can proceed further.

public void readFile()throws IOException
	{
		BufferedReader inputStream = null;
		FileInputStream fis=null;
		InputStreamReader isr = null;
		//Blank workbook
		XSSFWorkbook workbook = new XSSFWorkbook(); 						
		//Create a blank sheet
		XSSFSheet sheet = workbook.createSheet("Employee Data");
		//BufferedWriter outputStream = null;
		
		try {
			fis = new FileInputStream(file);
	        isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF8");
			//isr = new InputStreamReader(fis);
			String encode=isr.getEncoding();
			System.out.println(encode);
			//inputStream = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
			inputStream = new BufferedReader(isr);
			String path=file.getParent();
			//outputStream= new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(path+"\\xyz.txt"));
			
			String lineData;
			//outputStream.write("File is copying....");
			int rownum = 0;
			int cellnum = 0;
			
			while ((lineData = inputStream.readLine()) != null) {
				
				
				if (lineData!=null)
				{
				Row row = sheet.createRow(rownum++);
				
				Cell cell = row.createCell(cellnum);
				
				cell.setCellValue(lineData);
				}				
			}
			
			try 
			{
				//Write the workbook in file system
			    FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(path+"\\xyz1.xlsx");
			    workbook.write(out);
			    //workbook.w
			    out.close();
			    
			    System.out.println("howtodoinjava_demo.xlsx written successfully on disk.");
			     
			} 
			catch (Exception e) 
			{
			    e.printStackTrace();
			}	
		} finally {
			if (inputStream != null) {
				inputStream.close();
			}
			if (outputStream != null) {
				outputStream.close();
			}
		}
		
	}

[Ulf Dittmer]

The first thing I would fix is the name of the file encoding - there is no "UTF8", it's called "UTF-8".

The obvious thing to do would be to print out the values of "lineData" to check whether they are what you think they are.

[Thakur Sachin Singh]

Thanks Ulf - that was very silly mistake but now I have modify my code and have another problem:

Do you have any idea why getEncoding() method giving me UTF8 instead of UTF-8?

I am using eclipse and i think my old code is calling now. do you know how to fix this?

isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF-8");
			
			String encode=isr.getEncoding();
			System.out.println(encode); //this is printing UTF8 instead of UTF-8

[Ulf Dittmer]

Do you have any idea why getEncoding() method giving me UTF8 instead of UTF-8?

I don't. The java.nio.charset.Charset javadocs make it clear which charsets need to be supported. I did a quick grep through the Java source code, and it looks like some parts of it may accept "UTF8" instead of "UTF-8" (the XML parser, for example, although that may be required by the XML spec), but not all of it. And in particular, probably not the java.io package.

[Thakur Sachin Singh]

BTW UTF-16 is working for me.