Can any type be represented as a string using setter functions?

[adjenks]

I'm curious whether all types are necessary, or if I can express all types using strings. As in a normal spreadsheet, one does not necessarily have to define the type of a cell as a number for example in order for math functions to operate on it properly.
Therefor when I noticed that RawCellContent can be Date | string | number | boolean | null | undefined, I wondered if it were possible to simplify this to just string in my own wrappers/libraries/interactions, as it would be much more simple to deal with.
So, is there anything that would not work properly if I could never use any type but string? Or could I represent any cell data type using a string input for RawCellContent on setCellValue?

[sequba]

Hi @adjenks, thanks for reaching out

I wondered if it were possible to simplify this to just string in my own wrappers/libraries/interactions

It really depends on how you process the data in your wrappers/libraries/interactions. Internally, HyperFormula treats data differently depending on its type. For example, number 3.14 is not equal to string "3.14" but you may not need to distinguish them. If I were you, I would proceed with the simple approach (converting everything to strings) and add other types only when encountering problems.

PS: Apologies for the late reply 🙈

[adjenks]

Okay thank you, I'll give it a try.
I'd be curious to know to understand an example where HyperFormula would treat data differently, if it was a number rather than a string for example.
PS: No worries.

[sequba]

Numeric aggregation plugins (SUM, MIN, MAX etc) are the notable examples as they generally treat strings as 0:

[adjenks]

Okay, so there's a distinction here. In excel there are two types of strings that I'm aware of. Cells that have their number format set as string, like so:

And cells forced to a string using quotes (or just a leading quote) like so:

In hyperformula, the imported data can be a number, or string or as mentioned above RawCellContent can be even more types, but when I enter a number as a string it still works properly with number formulas. When entering a number as a string WITH a leading single apostrophe, it does also break the function, but this is what I expected. Here's a test of the three cases I can think of for HF:
https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/gallant-morning-glfq2n
The data:

And the result:

So, so far it behaves as I might expect. I guess whatever can be entered in a cell in excel can be represented as a string in HF, that's all I wanted to know really I suppose. All seems well and dandy thus far.

[adjenks]

I think these two functions answer all of my questions:

• hyperformula/src/Operations.ts

  Line 554 in b72f797

  public setCellContent(address: SimpleCellAddress, newCellContent: RawCellContent): [SimpleCellAddress, ClipboardCell] {

• hyperformula/src/CellContentParser.ts

  Line 99 in b72f797

  public parse(content: RawCellContent): CellContent.Type {

Basically it looks like string can represent anything; Date, number, boolean, null and undefined are all just available for convenience.

Thank you for your help!