Question

I have JLabel with an icon and text. Is there any possibility to hide only JLabel’s text? I don’t want to hide whole component (setVisible(false)), but only text, so an icon remains visible. I’d like to still use getText and setText methods.

Thanks for Your help!

Answer 1

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no direct way to do this. But you could try some of the following:

1. Extend JLabel and override the setText() and getText() methods. These should store the text you give it in a new String field. Every time you call setText it should only delegate to super.setText() is your label-text is not invisible. Then you could add a method that switches visibility. If you call setTextVisibility() with true, the class should call super.setText() with a string of spaces.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

  public class MyLabel extends JLabel {
    private String labelText;
    private boolean labelTextVisible = true;

    private MyLabel( String text, Icon icon, int horizontalAlignment ) {
      super( text, icon, horizontalAlignment );
      labelText = text;
    }

    private MyLabel( String text, int horizontalAlignment ) {
      super( text, horizontalAlignment );
      labelText = text;
    }

    private MyLabel( String text ) {
      super( text );
      labelText = text;
    }

    @Override
    public void setText( String text ) {
      if ( labelTextVisible ) {
        super.setText( text );
      }
      labelText = text;
    }

    @Override
    public String getText() {
      return labelText;
    }

    public void setLabelTextVisible( boolean labelVisible ){
      if(labelVisible){
        if(!labelText.equals( super.getText() )){
          super.setText( labelText );
        }
      }else{
        int spaceCount = super.getText().length();
        String hiddenText = "";
        for ( int i = 0; i < spaceCount; i++ ) {
          hiddenText+=" ";
        }
        super.setText(hiddenText);
      }
      this.labelTextVisible = labelVisible;
    }

    public boolean getLabelTextVisible(){
      return labelTextVisible;
    }
  }

1. (This is more of a hack, but it could work) Make the foregroundcolor of the label match the background color so the text is no longer visible.