I want to color the first row of csv file as first row contains header and i want to show it separately for user convenience.
First of all, CSV has no way of specify formatting options, it's a plain text file containing just the data. In order to add formatting you need to choose another format (may it be XLS, XLSX or just plain HTML).
In your code snippet, you use a jsp, that can be a good solution if you decide to emit HTML, but then again, you should use iteration tags on data and hardcode the HTML marckups in the jstp instead of emitting the document entirely.
If you plan to provide a download like in excel format, a servlet will be probably a better choice.
If you decide for excel compatible format you can use Apache POI to emit the document.
You can read here for a sample on how using a Servlet to emit a CSV.
CSV (comma separated values) are indeed just that: values. There's no way to include formatting in a CSV file
CSV is a plain text file. We cannot add formatting like color,font etc..,
If you want to add color, use xls or xlsx.
Related
I want to extract the data present inside a PDF file and present it in the format of a CSV/Excel sheet.I got to know that this can be done using Tika library in java.But,i did find the solution as to how extract the data as simple text,but i want to know how to store it in an excel sheet.
If someone has done such type of work earlier,then please help me.
The first part (and the hard one) is to parse original data and interpret it as a table. Apache Tika will give you xhtml representation (or call your own handler with SAX events) but it usually won't construct a table for you. From pdf file, I mean, since pdf isn't a tabular format by itself.
So, you'll have to take Tika-produced paragraphs, split them and pass resulting cells to some csv/xls/xlsx writter.
It might work if you have some regular table in you pdf (one line per table row, clean cell logical separation etc). But it will look like parsing plain text, of course.
In case I wouldn't work, you'll have to take pdf parser (like Apache PDFBox) and try to interpret its output.
The second part (output) is simple. If csv/ssv/tsv is suitable for you -- use your preferred library to produce it (I can recommend Apache commons-csv).
But take into account that MS Excel requires BOM for UTF-8 and UTF-16 csv to understand that file isn't in one-byte encoding (like CP-1252 etc).
If you want Excel xls or xlsx format -- just use Apache POI to write it.
I have a PDF that contains placeholders like <%DATE_OF_BIRTH%>, i want to be able to read in the PDF and change the PDF placeholder values to text using iText.
So read in PDF, use maybe a replaceString() method and change the placeholders then generate the new PDF.
Is this possible?
Thanks.
The use of placeholders in PDF is very, very limited. Theoretically it can be done and there are some instances where it would be feasible to do what you say, but because PDF doesn't know about structure very much, it's hard:
simply extracting words is difficult so recognising your placeholders in the PDF would already be difficult in many cases.
Replacing text in PDF is a nightmare because PDF files generally don't have a concept of words, lines and paragraphs. Hence no nice reflow of text for example.
Like I said, it could theoretically work under special conditions, but it's not a very good solution.
What would be a better approach depends on your use case:
1) For some forms it may be acceptable to have the complete form as a background image or PDF file and then generate your text as an overlay to that background (filling in the blanks so to speak) As pointed out by Bruno and mlk in comments, in this case you can also look into using form fields which can be dynamically filled.
2) For other forms it may be better to have your template in a structured format such as XML or HTML, do the text replacement in that format and then convert it into PDF.
So I am creating a csv report within my java code and using excel to open the exported csv file. One of the column is a date which I am formatting within my code to be mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss. This comes out as 02/10/2014 3:38:00 PM. Which is exactly how I want it. However the columns in the excel sheet display this as 02/10/2014 3:38. When I click on a cell in the excel sheet, it does display the full date at the top but I want it to display on the column itself so that it is easier to print. It doesn't seem like a column width issue since I have changed the column width but the full date still won't appear. I am however able to achieve it by changing the number format cells setting to custom. Is this something that can be done within java itself? Let me know if you need more information. Thanks!
Comma-separated values (CSV) is stores tabular data in plain-text format. To give Excel an instruction how to format a particular column you would need to user Excel format. In order to achieve it, you may use a Java library to export data in Excel format. One example of such a library is Apache POI - the Java API for Microsoft Documents (http://poi.apache.org/).
In addition, to work better with CSV files in Excel use import from text feature. This is a wizard you can specify the import settings, including column formats, width of the fields etc.
I hope it helps.
I see this to make text file and it also helps me out but in all examples i see that they just making string in notepad or we can say text file...
Can any one say that how to make table formatted text file in android??
i want to make file(invoice)
This is most likely going to involve some some slightly messy string processing. Assuming you have your data in an acceptable format (such as string arrays), you should be able to construct a single java string representing the whole table, and then use the code you found already to print it to a file. Use the escape character \t to separate between columns and \n to separate between rows.
That would be TSV format, and it is very easy to generate. Just add a TAB after every field, and a CR/LF pair after every record.
I have about 100 different text files in the same format. Each file has observations about certain events at certain time periods for a particular person. I am trying to parse out the relevant information for a few individuals for each of the different text files. Ideally, I want to get parse through all this information and create a CSV file (eventually to be imported into Excel) with all the information I need from ALL the text files. Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated. I would prefer to use java...but any simpler methods are appreciated.
The log files are structured as below: changed data to preserve private information
|||ID||NAME||TIME||FIRSTMEASURE^DATA||SECONDMEASURE^DATA|| etc...
TIME appears like 20110825111501 for 2011, 08/25 11:15:01 AM
Here are the steps in Java:
Open the file using FileReader
You could also wrapped the FileReader with BufferedReader and use readLine() method to read the file line by line
For each line you need to parse it. You know best the data definition of each line, to help you might be able to use various String functions or Java Regex
You could do the same thing for the Date. Check if you could utilize DateFormat
Once you parse the data, you could start building your CSV File using CSVParser mentioned above or write it your own using FileOutputStream
When you are ready to to convert to Excel, you could use Apache POI for Excel
Let me know if you need further clarification
Just to parse through the text file and use CSVParser from apache to write to a csv file. Additionally if you want to write in to excel, you can simply use Apache POI or JXL for that.
You can use SuperCSV to parse the file into a bean and
also to create a csv-file.