CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroid
the_prole
the_prole

Reputation: 8985

How to return a string with line breaks as \n characters

I'm getting the text from a TextView

 String textString = textView.getText().toString();

The problem is that if the text in the text view has line breaks like this for example

 My 
 Sentence has
 line breaks

When I log the text to the console 

 Log.v("TAG",textString);

Or if I set the text to a TextView 

 textView.setText(textString);

The result is always displayed with actual line breaks

 My 
 Sentence has
 line breaks

And not with the escape characters which is how I want it

 My\nSentence has\nline breaks

I know this is a really bad explanation, but how to get the text from the text view with the actual characters that represent the line breaks.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2776

Answers (2)

KDD
KDD

Reputation: 148

Try this 

 String demo = edit_new.getText().toString().replace(System.getProperty("line.separator"),"\\n" );

Upvotes: 1

Stephen C
Stephen C

Reputation: 719661

The problem is to format the String that we would represent in Java as

String test = "My\nSentence has\nline breaks";

as follows:

My\nSentence has\nline breaks

i.e. replacing each newline character with a backslash followed by a 'n' character.

One solution is to use String.replaceAll. For example, if you know that the line breaks are strictly newline characters then.

String unbroken = broken.replaceAll("\n", "\\\\n");

If the line break could be a platform specific line break then:

String unbroken = broken.replaceAll("\r\n|\n|\r", "\\\\n");

Note that the Java Pattern will treat a bare CR or NL in the regex as a literal character. However in the replacement string, we need a literal backslash character ... hence it needs to be double-escaped. Another way to write it would be:

String unbroken = broken.replaceAll("\n", Matcher.quoteReplacement("\\n"));

Refer to the javadoc for more details ... and the definitive explanation for the need to handle backslashes as special in the replacement string.

Upvotes: 0

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