Excel parsing (xls) date error

Posted by tau-neutrino on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by tau-neutrino
Published on 2010-04-12T18:44:51Z Indexed on 2010/04/12 18:53 UTC
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excel

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parsing

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date

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format

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error

I'm working on a project where I have to parse excel files for a client to extract data. An odd thing is popping up here: when I parse a date in the format of 5/9 (may 9th) in the excel sheet, I get 39577 in my program. I'm not sure if the year is encoded here (it is 2008 for these sheets).

Are these dates the number of days since some sort of epoch?

Does anyone know how to convert these numbers to something meaningful? I'm not looking for a solution that would convert these properly at time of parsing from the excel file (we already have thousands of extracted files that required a human to select relevant information - re-doing the extraction is not an option).

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