The JTextArea Class
The JTextArea
class
displays multiple lines of text in a single font and style. Its default behavior is
not to wrap lines of text, but line-wrapping can be enabled on word or
character boundaries. Figure
19-5 shows a JTextArea
.
Figure 19-5. JTextArea
Like all Swing JTextComponent
s
(but unlike java.awt.TextArea
),
JTextArea
lacks integrated scrollbars. Fortunately, it is easy to embed a JTextArea
inside a JScrollPane
for seamless scrolling. (JTextArea
implements the Scrollable
interface, so JScrollPane
can be intelligent about scrolling
it.)
JTextArea
handles newlines in a
cross-platform way. Line separators in text files can be newline
(\n
), carriage return (\r
), or carriage return newline (\r\n
), depending on the platform. Swing’s text
components remember which line separator was originally used, but always
use a newline character to represent one in memory. So always use
\n
when working with the content of a
text component. When writing the content back to disk (or to whatever
destination you give the write( )
method), the text component translates newlines back to the remembered
type. If there is no remembered type (because the content was created
from scratch), newlines are translated to the value of the line.separator
system property.
Properties
JTextArea
defines properties
shown in Table 19-6.
AccessibleJTextArea
is an inner
class that extends JTextComponent.AccessibleJTextComponent ...
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