Getting Cell as String in PHPExcel by column and row

Question

I am trying to read a cell with possible trailing zeros as a string instead of numeric (which strips off leading zeros). The cell is read by integer column/row as below instead

Answer 1

$keyCell = $sheet->getCellByColumnAndRow(1,5)->getValue();

Will read the cell data in the format that it's actually stored by Excel, you can't arbitrarily change that or tell PHPExcel to read it as a different datatype.

However, if the cell has formatting applied, then you can use

$keyCell = $sheet->getCellByColumnAndRow(1,5)->getFormattedValue();

instead, and this will return the data as a string, with whatever format mask was defined in the Excel spreadsheet

Answer 2

Same issue for me. I become crazy. Tried to set

 $objReader->setReadDataOnly(true);

wasn't working

tried

 $sheet->getCellByColumnAndRow(4,$row)->getValue()

because normaly display text as raw => doesn't working.

So last I change code in library. Edit file named DefaultValueBinder.php Search for dataTypeForValue function and set this :

    } elseif (is_float($pValue) || is_int($pValue)) {
        return PHPExcel_Cell_DataType::TYPE_STRING;//TYPE_NUMERIC patch here;

    } elseif (preg_match('/^\-?([0-9]+\\.?[0-9]*|[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]+)$/', $pValue)) {
        return PHPExcel_Cell_DataType::TYPE_STRING;//TYPE_NUMERIC patch here;

So now return numbers with 0