Java multiline string

Question

Coming from Perl, I sure am missing the "here-document" means of creating a multi-line string in source code:

$string = <<"EOF"  # create a three-line string
text
text
text
EOF

In Java, I have to have cumbersome quotes and plus signs on every line as I concatenate my multiline string from scratch.

What are some better alternatives? Define my string in a properties file?

Edit: Two answers say StringBuilder.append() is preferable to the plus notation. Could anyone elaborate as to why they think so? It doesn't look more preferable to me at all. I'm looking for a way around the fact that multiline strings are not a first-class language construct, which means I definitely don't want to replace a first-class language construct (string concatenation with plus) with method calls.

Edit: To clarify my question further, I'm not concerned about performance at all. I'm concerned about maintainability and design issues.

Answer 1

Stephen Colebourne has created a proposal for adding multi-line strings in Java 7.

Also, Groovy already has support for multi-line strings.

Answer 2

It sounds like you want to do a multiline literal, which does not exist in Java.

Your best alternative is going to be strings that are just +'d together. Some other options people have mentioned (StringBuilder, String.format, String.join) would only be preferable if you started with an array of strings.

Consider this:

String s = "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\n"
         + "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,\n"
         + "it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,\n"
         + "it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,\n"
         + "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,\n"
         + "we had everything before us, we had nothing before us";

Versus StringBuilder:

String s = new StringBuilder()
           .append("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,\n")
           .append("it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,\n")
           .append("it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,\n")
           .append("it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,\n")
           .append("it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,\n")
           .append("we had everything before us, we had nothing before us")
           .toString();

Versus String.format():

String s = String.format("%s\n%s\n%s\n%s\n%s\n%s"
         , "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"
         , "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,"
         , "it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,"
         , "it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,"
         , "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,"
         , "we had everything before us, we had nothing before us"
);

Versus Java8 String.join():

String s = String.join("\n"
         , "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,"
         , "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,"
         , "it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,"
         , "it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,"
         , "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,"
         , "we had everything before us, we had nothing before us"
);

If you want the newline for your particular system, you either need to use System.getProperty("line.separator"), or you can use %n in String.format.

Another option is to put the resource in a text file, and just read the contents of that file. This would be preferable for very large strings to avoid unnecessarily bloating your class files.

Answer 3

In Eclipse if you turn on the option "Escape text when pasting into a string literal" (in Preferences > Java > Editor > Typing) and paste a multi-lined string whithin quotes, it will automatically add " and \n" + for all your lines.

String str = "paste your text here";

Answer 4

This is an old thread, but a new quite elegant solution (with only 4 maybe 3 little drawbacks) is to use a custom annotation.

Check : http://www.adrianwalker.org/2011/12/java-multiline-string.html

A project inspired from that work is hosted on GitHub:

https://github.com/benelog/multiline

Example of Java code:

import org.adrianwalker.multilinestring.Multiline;
...
public final class MultilineStringUsage {

  /**
  <html>
    <head/>
    <body>
      <p>
        Hello<br/>
        Multiline<br/>
        World<br/>
      </p>
    </body>
  </html>
  */
  @Multiline
  private static String html;

  public static void main(final String[] args) {
    System.out.println(html);
  }
}

The drawbacks are

1. that you have to activate the corresponding (provided) annotation processor.
2. that String variable can not be defined as local variable Check Raw String Literals project where you can define variables as local variables
3. that String cannot contains other variables as in Visual Basic .Net with XML literal (<%= variable %>) :-)
4. that String literal is delimited by JavaDoc comment (/**)

And you probably have to configure Eclipse/Intellij-Idea to not reformat automatically your Javadoc comments.

One may find this weird (Javadoc comments are not designed to embed anything other than comments), but as this lack of multiline string in Java is really annoying in the end, I find this to be the least worst solution.

Answer 5

Another option may be to store long strings in an external file and read the file into a string.

Answer 6

This is something that you should never use without thinking about what it's doing. But for one-off scripts I've used this with great success:

Example:

    System.out.println(S(/*
This is a CRAZY " ' ' " multiline string with all sorts of strange 
   characters!
*/));

Code:

// From: http://blog.efftinge.de/2008/10/multi-line-string-literals-in-java.html
// Takes a comment (/**/) and turns everything inside the comment to a string that is returned from S()
public static String S() {
    StackTraceElement element = new RuntimeException().getStackTrace()[1];
    String name = element.getClassName().replace('.', '/') + ".java";
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    String line = null;
    InputStream in = classLoader.getResourceAsStream(name);
    String s = convertStreamToString(in, element.getLineNumber());
    return s.substring(s.indexOf("/*")+2, s.indexOf("*/"));
}

// From http://www.kodejava.org/examples/266.html
private static String convertStreamToString(InputStream is, int lineNum) {
    /*
     * To convert the InputStream to String we use the BufferedReader.readLine()
     * method. We iterate until the BufferedReader return null which means
     * there's no more data to read. Each line will appended to a StringBuilder
     * and returned as String.
     */
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    String line = null; int i = 1;
    try {
        while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            if (i++ >= lineNum) {
                sb.append(line + "\n");
            }
        }
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    } finally {
        try {
            is.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    return sb.toString();
}

Answer 7

String.join

Java 8 added a new static method to java.lang.String which offers a slightly better alternative:

String.join( CharSequence delimiter , CharSequence... elements )

Using it:

String s = String.join(
    System.getProperty("line.separator"),
    "First line.",
    "Second line.",
    "The rest.",
    "And the last!"
);

Answer 8

If you define your strings in a properties file it'll look much worse. IIRC, it'll look like:

string:text\u000atext\u000atext\u000a

Generally it's a reasonable idea to not embed large strings in to source. You might want to load them as resources, perhaps in XML or a readable text format. The text files can be either read at runtime or compiled into Java source. If you end up placing them in the source, I suggest putting the + at the front and omitting unnecessary new lines:

final String text = ""
    +"text "
    +"text "
    +"text"
;

If you do have new lines, you might want some of join or formatting method:

final String text = join("\r\n"
    ,"text"
    ,"text"
    ,"text"
);

Answer 9

Pluses are converted to StringBuilder.append, except when both strings are constants so the compiler can combine them at compile time. At least, that's how it is in Sun's compiler, and I would suspect most if not all other compilers would do the same.

So:

String a="Hello";
String b="Goodbye";
String c=a+b;

normally generates exactly the same code as:

String a="Hello";
String b="Goodbye":
StringBuilder temp=new StringBuilder();
temp.append(a).append(b);
String c=temp.toString();

On the other hand:

String c="Hello"+"Goodbye";

is the same as:

String c="HelloGoodbye";

That is, there's no penalty in breaking your string literals across multiple lines with plus signs for readability.

Answer 10

In the IntelliJ IDE you just need to type:

""

Then position your cursor inside the quotation marks and paste your string. The IDE will expand it into multiple concatenated lines.

Answer 11

JEP 355: Text Blocks (Preview) aims to cover this functionality, it is currently targeting JDK 13 as a preview feature. Allowing to write something like:

String s = """
    text
    text
    text
  """;

Previous to this JEP, in JDK12, JEP 326: Raw String Literals aimed to implement a similar feature, but it was finally withdrawn.

Answer 12

Sadly, Java does not have multi-line string literals. You either have to concatenate string literals (using + or StringBuilder being the two most common approaches to this) or read the string in from a separate file.

For large multi-line string literals I'd be inclined to use a separate file and read it in using getResourceAsStream() (a method of the Class class). This makes it easy to find the file as you don't have to worry about the current directory versus where your code was installed. It also makes packaging easier, because you can actually store the file in your jar file.

Suppose you're in a class called Foo. Just do something like this:

Reader r = new InputStreamReader(Foo.class.getResourceAsStream("filename"), "UTF-8");
String s = Utils.readAll(r);

The one other annoyance is that Java doesn't have a standard "read all of the text from this Reader into a String" method. It's pretty easy to write though:

public static String readAll(Reader input) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    char[] buffer = new char[4096];
    int charsRead;
    while ((charsRead = input.read(buffer)) >= 0) {
        sb.append(buffer, 0, charsRead);
    }
    input.close();
    return sb.toString();
}

Answer 13

String newline = System.getProperty ("line.separator");
string1 + newline + string2 + newline + string3

But, the best alternative is to use String.format

String multilineString = String.format("%s\n%s\n%s\n",line1,line2,line3);

Answer 14

Since Java does not (yet) native support multi-line strings, the only way for now is to hack around it using one of the aforementioned techniques. I built the following Python script using some of the tricks mentioned above:

import sys
import string
import os

print 'new String('
for line in sys.stdin:
    one = string.replace(line, '"', '\\"').rstrip(os.linesep)
    print '  + "' + one + ' "'
print ')'

Put that in a file named javastringify.py and your string in a file mystring.txt and run it as follows:

cat mystring.txt | python javastringify.py

You can then copy the output and paste it into your editor.

Modify this as needed to handle any special cases but this works for my needs. Hope this helps!

Answer 15

You may use scala-code, which is compatible to java, and allows multiline-Strings enclosed with """:

package foobar
object SWrap {
  def bar = """John said: "This is
  a test
  a bloody test,
  my dear." and closed the door.""" 
}

(note the quotes inside the string) and from java:

String s2 = foobar.SWrap.bar ();

Whether this is more comfortable ...?

Another approach, if you often handle long text, which should be placed in your sourcecode, might be a script, which takes the text from an external file, and wrappes it as a multiline-java-String like this:

sed '1s/^/String s = \"/;2,$s/^/\t+ "/;2,$s/$/"/' file > file.java

so that you may cut-and-paste it easily into your source.

Answer 16

You can concatenate your appends in a separate method like:

public static String multilineString(String... lines){
   StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
   for(String s : lines){
     sb.append(s);
     sb.append ('\n');
   }
   return sb.toString();
}

Either way, prefer StringBuilder to the plus notation.

Answer 17

Actually, the following is the cleanest implementation I have seen so far. It uses an annotation to convert a comment into a string variable...

/**
  <html>
    <head/>
    <body>
      <p>
        Hello<br/>
        Multiline<br/>
        World<br/>
      </p>
    </body>
  </html>
  */
  @Multiline
  private static String html;

So, the end result is that the variable html contains the multiline string. No quotes, no pluses, no commas, just pure string.

This solution is available at the following URL... http://www.adrianwalker.org/2011/12/java-multiline-string.html

Hope that helps!

Answer 18

See Java Stringfier. Turns your text into a StringBuilder java block escaping if needed.

Answer 19

An alternative I haven't seen as answer yet is the java.io.PrintWriter.

StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(stringWriter);
writer.println("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times");
writer.println("it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,");
writer.println("it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,");
writer.println("it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,");
writer.println("it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,");
writer.println("we had everything before us, we had nothing before us");
String string = stringWriter.toString();

Also the fact that java.io.BufferedWriter has a newLine() method is unmentioned.

Answer 20

    import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils;

    String multiline = StringUtils.join(new String[] {
        "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ", 
        "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness",
        "it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity",
        "it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness",
        "it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair",
        "we had everything before us, we had nothing before us",
        }, "\n");

Answer 21

If you like google's guava as much as I do, it can give a fairly clean representation and a nice, easy way to not hardcode your newline characters too:

String out = Joiner.on(newline).join(ImmutableList.of(
    "line1",
    "line2",
    "line3"));

Answer 22

Use Properties.loadFromXML(InputStream). There's no need for external libs.

Better than a messy code (since maintainability and design are your concern), it is preferable not to use long strings.

Start by reading xml properties:

 InputStream fileIS = YourClass.class.getResourceAsStream("MultiLine.xml");
 Properties prop = new Properies();
 prop.loadFromXML(fileIS);

then you can use your multiline string in a more maintainable way...

static final String UNIQUE_MEANINGFUL_KEY = "Super Duper UNIQUE Key";
prop.getProperty(UNIQUE_MEANINGFUL_KEY) // "\n    MEGA\n   LONG\n..."

MultiLine.xml` gets located in the same folder YourClass:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd">

<properties>
    <entry key="Super Duper UNIQUE Key">
       MEGA
       LONG
       MULTILINE
    </entry>
</properties>

PS.: You can use <![CDATA[" ... "]]> for xml-like string.

Answer 23

A quite efficient and platform independent solution would be using the system property for line separators and the StringBuilder class to build strings:

String separator = System.getProperty("line.separator");
String[] lines = {"Line 1", "Line 2" /*, ... */};

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(lines[0]);
for (int i = 1; i < lines.length(); i++) {
    builder.append(separator).append(lines[i]);
}
String multiLine = builder.toString();

Answer 24

With JDK/12 early access build # 12, one can now use multiline strings in Java as follows :

String multiLine = `First line
    Second line with indentation
Third line
and so on...`; // the formatting as desired
System.out.println(multiLine);

and this results in the following output:

First line
    Second line with indentation
Third line
and so on...

Answer 25

Define my string in a properties file?

Multiline strings aren't allowed in properties files. You can use \n in properties files, but I don't think that is much of a solution in your case.

Answer 26

One good option.

import static some.Util.*;

    public class Java {

        public static void main(String[] args) {

            String sql = $(
              "Select * from java",
              "join some on ",
              "group by"        
            );

            System.out.println(sql);
        }

    }


    public class Util {

        public static String $(String ...sql){
            return String.join(System.getProperty("line.separator"),sql);
        }

    }

Answer 27

I know this is an old question, however for intersted developers Multi line literals gonna be in #Java12

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-dev/2018-July/003254.html

Answer 28

I suggest using a utility as suggested by ThomasP, and then link that into your build process. An external file is still present to contain the text, but the file is not read at runtime. The workflow is then:

1. Build a 'textfile to java code' utility & check into version control
2. On each build, run the utility against the resource file to create a revised java source
3. The Java source contains a header like class TextBlock {... followed by a static string which is auto-generated from the resource file
4. Build the generated java file with the rest of your code

Answer 29

When a long series of + are used, only one StringBuilder is created, unless the String is determined at compile time in which case no StringBuilder is used!

The only time StringBuilder is more efficient is when multiple statements are used to construct the String.

String a = "a\n";
String b = "b\n";
String c = "c\n";
String d = "d\n";

String abcd = a + b + c + d;
System.out.println(abcd);

String abcd2 = "a\n" +
        "b\n" +
        "c\n" +
        "d\n";
System.out.println(abcd2);

Note: Only one StringBuilder is created.

  Code:
   0:   ldc     #2; //String a\n
   2:   astore_1
   3:   ldc     #3; //String b\n
   5:   astore_2
   6:   ldc     #4; //String c\n
   8:   astore_3
   9:   ldc     #5; //String d\n
   11:  astore  4
   13:  new     #6; //class java/lang/StringBuilder
   16:  dup
   17:  invokespecial   #7; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder."<init>":()V
   20:  aload_1
   21:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   24:  aload_2
   25:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   28:  aload_3
   29:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   32:  aload   4
   34:  invokevirtual   #8; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append:(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;
   37:  invokevirtual   #9; //Method java/lang/StringBuilder.toString:()Ljava/lang/String;
   40:  astore  5
   42:  getstatic       #10; //Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
   45:  aload   5
   47:  invokevirtual   #11; //Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/String;)V
   50:  ldc     #12; //String a\nb\nc\nd\n
   52:  astore  6
   54:  getstatic       #10; //Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
   57:  aload   6
   59:  invokevirtual   #11; //Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/String;)V
   62:  return

To clarify my question further, I'm not concerned about performance at all. I'm concerned about maintainability and design issues.

Make it as clear and simple as you can.

Answer 30

One small trick. Using this I inject javascritp in a dynamically created HTML page

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

public String getString()
{
    return builder.toString();
}
private DropdownContent _(String a)
{
    builder.append(a);
    return this;
}

public String funct_showhide()
{
   return
    _("function slidedown_showHide(boxId)").
    _("{").
    _("if(!slidedown_direction[boxId])slidedown_direction[boxId] = 1;").
    _("if(!slideDownInitHeight[boxId])slideDownInitHeight[boxId] = 0;").
    _("if(slideDownInitHeight[boxId]==0)slidedown_direction[boxId]=slidedownSpeed; ").
    _("else slidedown_direction[boxId] = slidedownSpeed*-1;").
    _("slidedownContentBox = document.getElementById(boxId);").
    _("var subDivs = slidedownContentBox.getElementsByTagName('DIV');").
    _("for(var no=0;no<subDivs.length;no++){").
    _(" if(subDivs[no].className=='dhtmlgoodies_content')slidedownContent = subDivs[no];").
    _("}").
    _("contentHeight = slidedownContent.offsetHeight;").
    _("slidedownContentBox.style.visibility='visible';").
    _("slidedownActive = true;").
    _("slidedown_showHide_start(slidedownContentBox,slidedownContent);").
    _("}").getString();

}