Question

I want to read/extract the value from HSSFComment.
I can access the HSSFComment by the following code:

HSSFComment comment = workSheet.getCellComment(1, 0);

But, how can I get the text/value from that “comment” instance?

there are tow methods in HSSFComment:

getTextObjectRecord() 
getNoteRecord() 

But both are protected methods…that’s why I can’t access those from my class. in other word, these methods are not visible from my class. Following line of code doesn’t compile.

TextObjectRecord txo = comment.getTextObjectRecord();

Any comments?

Answer 1

Use getString() inherited from HSSFTextBox. This returns an HSSFRichTextString, which itself has a getString() method to get the plain text. In otherwords

String comment = cell.getComment().getString().getString();

Which you can’t do like that due to the possibility of null returns, but that’s the idea.