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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
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1. Overview
String formatting and generating text output often comes up during programming. In many cases, there is a need to add a new line to a string to format the output.
Let’s discuss how to use newline characters.
Further reading:
Checking for Empty or Blank Strings in Java
Check out some simple ways in Java to test if a string is blank or empty.
Check If a String Contains a Substring
Explore various ways to search for a substring in a String with performance benchmarks
2. Adding Newline Characters in a String
Operating systems have special characters denoting the start of a new line. For example, in Linux a new line is denoted by “\n”, also called a Line Feed. In Windows, a new line is denoted using “\r\n”, sometimes called a Carriage Return and Line Feed, or CRLF.
Adding a new line in Java is as simple as including “\n” , “\r”, or “\r\n” at the end of our string.
2.1. Using CRLF Line-Breaks
For this example, we want to create a paragraph using two lines of text. Specifically, we want line2 to appear in a new line after line1.
For a Unix/Linux/New Mac-based OS we can use “\n”:
String line1 = "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.";
String line2 = "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.";
String rhyme = line1 + "\n" + line2;If we are on a Windows-based OS, we can use “\r\n”:
rhyme = line1 + "\r\n" + line2;For an old Mac-based OS, we can use “\r”:
rhyme = line1 + "\r" + line2;We’ve demonstrated three methods of adding a new line, but unfortunately, they’re platform dependent.
2.2. Using Platform Independent Line Separators
We can use system defined constants when we want our code to be platform independent.
For example, using System.lineSeparator() for giving a line separator:
rhyme = line1 + System.lineSeparator() + line2;Or we could also use System.getProperty(“line.separator”):
rhyme = line1 + System.getProperty("line.separator") + line2;2.3. Using Platform Independent Newline Characters
Although line separators provide platform independence, they force us to concatenate our strings.
If we are using something like System.out.printf or String.format, then the platform independent newline character, %n, can be used directly within a string:
rhyme = "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.%nHumpty Dumpty had a great fall.";This is the same as including System.lineSeparator() within our string, but we don’t need to divide the string into multiple parts.
3. Adding Newline Characters in an HTML Page
Suppose we are creating a string that is part of an HTML page. In that case, we can add an HTML break tag <br>.
We can also use Unicode characters “& #13;” (Carriage Return) and “& #10;” (Line Feed). Although these characters work, they don’t work exactly like we might expect them to across all platforms. Instead, it is better to use <br> for line breaks.
Additionally, we can use “\n” in some HTML elements to break a line.
Overall, these are the three methods of breaking a line in HTML. We can decide which one to use depending on the HTML tag we are using.
3.1. HTML Break Tag
We can use HTML break tag <br> to break a line:
rhyme = line1 + "<br>" + line2;The <br> tag for breaking a line works in almost all HTML elements like <body>, <p>, <pre>, etc. However, note that it does not work in the <textarea> tag.
3.2. Newline Character
We can use ‘\n’ to break a line if text is enclosed in <pre> or <textarea> tag:
rhyme = line1 + "\n" + line2;3.3. Unicode Characters
Finally, we can use Unicode characters “& #13;” (Carriage Return) and “& #10;” (Line Feed) to break a line. For example, in the <textarea> tag we can use either of these:
rhyme = line1 + "
" + line2;
rhyme = line1 + "
" + line2;
For the <pre> tag, both of the lines below will work:
rhyme = line1 + "
" + line2;
rhyme = line1 + "
" + line2;
4. The Difference Between \n and \r
\r and \n are characters denoted with ASCII values of 13 (CR) and 10 (LF), respectively. They both represent a break between two lines, but operating systems use them differently.
On Windows, a sequence of two characters is used to start a new line, CR immediately followed by LF. Conversely, on Unix-like systems, only LF is used.
When writing Java applications, we must pay attention to the line break characters we use because the applications will behave differently depending on the operating system they will run on.
The safest and most cross-compatible option is to use System.lineSeparator(). This way, we won’t have to take the operating system into account.
5. Conclusion
In this article, we discussed how to add newline characters to a string in Java.
We also saw how to write platform independent code for a new line using System.lineSeparator() and System.getProperty(“line.separator”).
Finally, we wrapped up with how to add a new line in case we are generating an HTML page.
The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
