Question

I fill the ListView from Database. One of the fields in DB contains text with \n. But when I put this text into the item, then I don’t get Newline instead of \n. How does I must correctly take this text from DB and put it into the item?

My code:

txtComment = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.txt_comment);
this.cur.moveToPosition(position);
txtComment.setText(this.cur.getString(this.cur.getColumnIndex("comment")));

In DB item:

The probe was built to land on the larger … rock to bring back to Earth.\nSuch a venture should …

result in android:

The probe was built to land on the larger … rock to bring back to Earth.\nSuch a venture should …

I expected:

The probe was built to land on the larger … rock to bring back to Earth.

Such a venture should …

TextView from item.xml:

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/txt_comment"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:gravity="center_vertical"
    android:paddingLeft="5dip"
    android:padding="5dip"
    android:textColor="#fff"
    android:textSize="12sp" />

Content for DB I am taking by parsing JSON. I can ask developer to insert smth else instead of \n. But what?

Answer 1

A string containing a backslash followed by an n is very different to a string containing a newline. It’s only when a string is parsed as a string literal that Java treats them differently. If you want to store a newline in a database, you should just store it in the value to start with. If you want to apply Java string literal escaping, you’ll need to find some appropriate code to do so – which isn’t just as simple as text.replace("\\n", "\n") for example, as you also need to take account of situations like "escaped\\n".

I suspect there’ll be some string utility libraries somewhere which can do this – the StringEscapeUtils class from Apache Commons 3.1 looks like a good starting point, if it works in Android, for example.