Question

Display whitespace characters in Eclipse is a simple trick, but unfortunately this applies only on Editor views.

Is there a way to display these characters in the Console view too? I would find it useful for checking if strings are correctly formatted. Any help?

Answer 1

As there was a bit of confusion regarding the term “whitespace characters”, I will attempt to cover both possible instances.

If you wish to display such things as new lines and tabs, Java Strings include special characters for these constructs. \n will display a newline (line break). \t will display a tab. \r is a carriage return. There are others, as shown in the table here, but these are the most common.

Alternatively, if you intended displaying whitespace as a visible character, this is a different issue entirely. In this situation, I am assuming you wish to display a tab as an arrow or a space between words as a dot, like some text editors do. As far as I know, there is no built-in capability for this.

You could, however, replace existing whitespace with a unicode character that you want to represent that type of whitespace. The Java String class supports the use of unicode characters; it would just be a matter of finding the one you wish to use to indicate, say, a tab and then replacing all instances of \t with that symbol.