title: How deal with blank cells in excel files java
body: <p>I am making a program where I am reading data from excel files and store them in tables. I have made the program using Apache POI and works fine. But when files have blank cells as the one here <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/FyGgp.png" alt="enter image description here"> I have some problems. The program skip the blanks and read the next data. Could anyone help me how I would do it? I know that there are several posts for this issue but I have not found something useful for me.</p>
  
  <p>The code for reading the data from excel file is the below. As you can see I have 3 types of data. How i would give the option for BLANK CELL?</p>
  
  <pre><code>// Create an ArrayList to store the data read from excel sheet.
          List sheetData = new ArrayList();
          FileInputStream fis = null;
          try {
              // Create a FileInputStream that will be use to read the
              // excel file.
              fis = new FileInputStream(strfullPath);
              // Create an excel workbook from the file system
              HSSFWorkbook workbook = new HSSFWorkbook(fis);
  
              // Get the first sheet on the workbook.
              HSSFSheet sheet = workbook.getSheetAt(0);
  
              // store the data read on an ArrayList so that we can printed the
              // content of the excel to the console.
              Iterator rows = sheet.rowIterator();
              while (rows.hasNext()) {
                  HSSFRow row = (HSSFRow) rows.next();
                  Iterator cells = row.cellIterator();
  
                  List data = new ArrayList();
                  while (cells.hasNext()) {
                      HSSFCell cell = (HSSFCell) cells.next();
                      data.add(cell);
                  }
                  sheetData.add(data);
              }
  
          } catch (IOException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
          } finally {
              if (fis != null) {
                  fis.close();
              }
          }
  showExcelData(sheetData);
  }
  private static void showExcelData(List sheetData) {
          // LinkedHashMap&lt;String, String&gt; tableFields = new LinkedHashMap();
          for (int i = 0; i &lt; sheetData.size(); i++) {
              List list = (List) sheetData.get(i);
              for (int j = 0; j &lt; list.size(); j++) {
                  Cell cell = (Cell) list.get(j);
                  if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC) {
                      System.out.print(cell.getNumericCellValue());
                  } else if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING) {
                      System.out.print(cell.getRichStringCellValue());
                  } else if (cell.getCellType() == Cell.CELL_TYPE_BOOLEAN) {
                      System.out.print(cell.getBooleanCellValue());
                  } else if (cell.getCellType()== Cell.CELL_TYPE_BLANK ){
                      System.out.print(cell.toString());
                  }
                  if (j &lt; list.size() - 1) {
                      System.out.print(", ");
                  }
              }
              System.out.println("");
          }
  
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Also I have read about <code>workbook.setMissingCellPolicy(HSSFRow.RETURN_NULL_AND_BLANK);</code>. Could this help me with my problem?</p>