Thread: A quick fix and some help reading from excel / text file

Alright, so some of you may remember me from the other day, when I needed help fixing for loops and using a Scanner. Things have come a long way since then, and my code is largely functional! My next goal is to add code that facilitates character creation from base stats, which means reading from the Google Doc that the stats are in, then writing them to (I think, ideally) a four-dimensional array: one dimension to determine whether stats are bases or growths, one to determine the race of the unit, one to determine their class and then one to actually store the numbers. If there's a drastically superior way to store that data I'm open to changing that, but speed isn't a huge issue since this will only need to be done once per game. My big question right now is how to get that data from the file, and whether it's better to manually input the data into the java code or to read it every time from a text file.

Well, I took some of your advice as far as OOP, and made a unitStats class which knows its own stats, etc, and then I build the unit by giving it its race and two classes. These values provide the necessary offset to reference the correct parts of the spreadsheet I'm using to hold all this data, which is done when the unit is instantiated. My issue now is an odd ArrayOutOfBounds exception that I can't put my finger on. The relevant code for unitData is below and the junk code I'm using to test it is below that.

	public unitData(int a, int b, int c) throws BiffException, IOException
	{
		Workbook workbook = Workbook.getWorkbook(new File("Job Stats FFTA2.xls"));
		Sheet sheet = workbook.getSheet(0);
		switch(a)
		{ //determines the offset from the top of the sheet to draw data from
			case 1: race = 1;
			case 2: race = 15;
			case 3: race = 28;
			case 4: race = 40;
			case 5: race = 53;
			case 6: race = 65;
		}
		pClass = b;
		sClass = c;
		Cell cell; //the cell taken temporarily from the sheet
		int prisoner; //the data contained in the cell
 
		for(int x=0;x<7;x++){
			cell = sheet.getCell(race+b,x+9);
			prisoner = Integer.parseInt(cell.getContents());
			unitStats[x]+=prisoner;} //adds the base stats for the primary class. 
		for(int x=0;x<7;x++){
			cell = sheet.getCell(race+b,x);
			prisoner = Integer.parseInt(cell.getContents());
			unitStats[x]+=prisoner;} //adds the growths for the primary class
		for(int x=0;x<7;x++){
			cell = sheet.getCell(race+c,x);
			prisoner = Integer.parseInt(cell.getContents());
			unitStats[x]+=prisoner;} //adds the growths for the secondary class
		hpMax = unitStats[0]; //sets max HP for later calculations
		mpMax = unitStats[1]; //sets max HP for later calculations
	}

unitData fred = new unitData(1,5,3);
		System.out.println(fred.getHP());

An online version of the spreadsheet used is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...Xc&pli=1#gid=0