I'm writing code to dynamically assign an appropriate data type and format to data presented as strings. That is, I check the string for dollar, percentage, numeric or date data before defaulting to string data.
All works fine (though it's a pain to have to do all that - it'd be nice to have a method somewhere in POI to analyze a string and produce a data type, format and optional numeric value in some highly optimized way). Anyway, my problem comes with decimals. I'm able to use getFormat to produce custom formats with a variable number of decimal places based on how many were in the input string, and that works fine. Excel seems to display these on the 'format cell' dialog under Custom. But it also displays an explicit 'Decimal places' edit box where you can control this. My question. Does excel support data formats like "0.%" with the number of decimal places specified explicitly somewhere other than in the format string? It would seem much more efficient to work that way rather than to have to parse format strings to determine the number of decimal places. I guess this is another stupid question in the sense of 'why do you think we call it the Horrible Spreadsheet Format'? But can't hurt to ask. In the meantime, I'm also wondering whether Java-wise, it'd be more efficient to keep my own list of data type, #decimals combinations I've encountered so far scan that for formats. Or is it okay to just dynamically build a string with the right number of decimals each time and let getFormat take care of searching its list. In other words, are all those string concatenations expensive processing wise? Or does it all pale next to the parsing of the original strings to determine #decimals to begin with... Thanks, Rob -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/number-of-decimal-places-in-data-formats-tp20671940p20671940.html Sent from the POI - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
