Introduction

As of Java 15 there is a new feature called Text Block (also sometimes called Multi-Line Strings). The Text Blocks can be used by declaring the string with “””:

String multiline = """
                line1
                line2
                """;

Since Java 1.5 the String class have a format method.Java’s String.format() is a static method that returns a formatted String using the given locale, format String, and arguments.

Problem

It is a bad practice (see SpotBugs FS: Format string should use %n rather than \n) to use platform specific <EOL>character/s within strings to be formatted. For example if your string to be formatted contains Linux EOL character (\n) it might be wrongly interpreted if the code is executed on Windows platform on which the EOL character is \r\n.

In format strings, it is generally preferable to use %n, which will produce the platform-specific line separator at runtime.

Now, the Text Blocks will have multiple lines so what is the right way to still use multi-line strings and have a portable format strings ?

Solution

• use %n format specifier to represent a newline character
• use \ escape character so that the new lines inserted by the IDE are ignored.The \<line-terminator> escape sequence explicitly suppresses the inclusion of an implicit new line character.

 String multiline = """
                line1%n\
                line2%n\
                """;