Spreadsheet importer returns shared-string index for... | openai/codex

What issue are you seeing?

SpreadsheetFile.importXlsx in the Codex Spreadsheets runtime resolves an XLSX shared-string cell incorrectly when the referenced shared string is empty.

For this valid OOXML:

<!-- xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml -->
<c r="A2" t="s"><v>1</v></c>
<c r="B2" t="s"><v>0</v></c>

<!-- xl/sharedStrings.xml -->
<sst xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main"
     count="2" uniqueCount="2">
  <si><t>visible</t></si>
  <si><t/></si>
</sst>

A2 references shared-string index 1, whose resolved content is an empty string. Codex instead returns the raw index text "1". B2 correctly resolves index 0 to "visible".

This can silently turn blank spreadsheet cells into valid-looking numeric strings. Downstream data transformations can therefore write incorrect values without any parse error.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Environment:

Codex App: 26.803.61601 (build 6396)
Workspace dependencies bundle: 26.805.11740
@oai/artifact-tool: 2.8.39
Platform: Darwin 25.5.0 arm64 arm

Decode the sanitized workbook included below.
Import it with the bundled runtime:

import { FileBlob, SpreadsheetFile } from "@oai/artifact-tool";

const workbook = await SpreadsheetFile.importXlsx(
  await FileBlob.load("codex-empty-shared-string-repro.xlsx"),
);

const result = await workbook.inspect({
  kind: "table",
  sheetId: "Repro",
  range: "A1:B2",
  include: "values,formulas",
});

console.log(result.ndjson);

Observe the imported values:

[["empty_shared_string","control"],["1","visible"]]

Open the same workbook in WPS/Excel-compatible software, or export it with LibreOffice Calc:

empty_shared_string,control
,visible

The independent reader correctly leaves A2 blank.

What is the expected behavior?

A2 should resolve to an empty string (or the importer's documented blank-cell representation), never to the shared-string table index.

Expected values:

[["empty_shared_string","control"],["","visible"]]

Additional information

The workbook is fully synthetic and contains no user, repository, company, or business data.
The XLSX ZIP package passes integrity validation and contains only eight standard OOXML entries.
There are no formulas or external links.
A structurally identical real-world workbook used a different shared-string index and showed the same failure mode.
The behavior is consistent with a falsy empty-string resolution falling back to the raw index. This is an inference from the observed boundary, not a source-code-confirmed root cause.

Sanitized minimal XLSX (base64, 3.6 KB)

SHA-256: aa567082dafc74bd1f2c4ab1d124a9917101a66c4777b572c8645a075e287524

Save the block as repro.b64, then decode it:

python3 -c 'import base64,pathlib; pathlib.Path("codex-empty-shared-string-repro.xlsx").write_bytes(base64.b64decode(pathlib.Path("repro.b64").read_text()))'

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Spreadsheet importer returns shared-string index for an empty XLSX shared string

Description

What issue are you seeing?

What steps can reproduce the bug?

What is the expected behavior?

Additional information

Contributor guide

First steps

Research direction

Assessment

Spreadsheet importer returns shared-string index for an empty XLSX shared string

Description

What issue are you seeing?

What steps can reproduce the bug?

What is the expected behavior?

Additional information

Contributor guide

First steps

Research direction

Assessment

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