Question

I have a large block of text (200+ characters in a String) and need to insert new lines at the next space after 30 characters, to preserve words. Here is what I have now (NOT working):

String rawInfo = front.getItemInfo(name);
String info = "";
int begin = 0;
for(int l=30;(l+30)<rawInfo.length();l+=30) {
    while(rawInfo.charAt(l)!=' ')
        l++;
    info += rawInfo.substring(begin, l) + "\n";
    begin = l+1;
    if((l+30)>=(rawInfo.length()))
        info += rawInfo.substring(begin, rawInfo.length());
}

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

As suggested by kdgregory, using a StringBuilder would probably be an easier way to work with string manipulation.

Since I wasn’t quite sure if the number of characters before the newline is inserted is the word before or after 30 characters, I opted to go for the word after 30 characters, as the implementation is probably easier.

The approach is to find the instance of the " " which occurs at least 30 characters after the current character which is being viewed by using StringBuilder.indexOf. When a space occurs, a \n is inserted by StringBuilder.insert.

(We’ll assume that a newline is \n here — the actual line separator used in the current environment can be retrieved by System.getProperty("line.separator");).

Here’s the example:

String s = "A very long string containing " +
    "many many words and characters. " +
    "Newlines will be entered at spaces.";

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(s);

int i = 0;
while ((i = sb.indexOf(" ", i + 30)) != -1) {
    sb.replace(i, i + 1, "\n");
}

System.out.println(sb.toString());

Result:

A very long string containing many
many words and characters. Newlines
will.

I should add that the code above hasn’t been tested out, except for the example String that I’ve shown in the code. It wouldn’t be too surprising if it didn’t work under certain circumstances.

Edit

The loop in the sample code has been replaced by a while loop rather than a for loop which wasn’t very appropriate in this example.

Also, the StringBuilder.insert method was replaced by the StringBuilder.replace method, as Kevin Stich mentioned in the comments that the replace method was used rather than the insert to get the desired behavior.