Google Spreadsheet Script getValues - Force int instead of string

11
votes

Is there a way to force .getRange().getValues() to return an int? Although only numbers exist in my range, it is returning them as strings. I would like to avoid using parseInt in every one of my statements or creating a separate array with converted values.

Or is that the only solution, to get the array and then parseInt the entire array in a loop?

3
javascriptgoogle-apps-scriptgoogle-sheets
I ended up writing a function that just runs parseInt() on an array and would call it after reading in the information. This worked fine (simple loop), but I wanted to make the spreadsheet a bit faster, so I decided to read one large array and then saved off the elements as separate 1D Arrays. When I did that, their new home correctly stored them as integers. So, that is another way to fix the problem. - user1469541

3 Answers

18
votes

you can do this easily using the unary '+' operator as follows:

First get your values from your spreadsheet using getValue() or getValues(). Suppose you get two such values, and store them in A = 1 and B = 2. You can force them to be recognized as numbers by using any math binary operator except for +, which concatenates strings, so A - B = -1, while A + B will return '12'.

You can force the variables to be numbers simply by using the + unary operator with any variable that might be interpreted as a string. For example, +A + +B will return the correct value of 3.

13
votes

You can use parseInt() or Number()

example 

var A='12';var B=5
A+B = 125
parseInt(A)+B = 17
Number(A)+B = 17

That said, getValues() is not supposed to return strings unless values have some space or other non-numeric characters in it... are these values entered manually or come as a result of some function ?

2
votes

getValues() returns a 2D array of Objects - so these are Strings, Integers or Date objects depending on what these are formatted as in your spreadsheet.

Go back to your spreadsheet and see what the cells that have integer values are formatted as. Format them as integers and you should get back integers.