Thread: Make JTextArea Support HTML

I need to know how to make JTextArea or JEditorPane able to support HTML coding.

Could anyone give me an example of how to do this?

Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.

P.S. Please do not link me to the Java Tutorial page or API section for either component. I have failed to understand them on this subject in the past, so I don't believe I will suddenly find them useful now.

What have you found when you search for JEditorPane code examples?

Originally Posted by Junky

Anything we post would just be a rehash (and a poor one at that) of the information already provided in those 2 resources. So what makes you think that reading our post(s) will suddenly make you understand?

A different scenario often helps with the comprehension process.

And the JTextPane tutorial provides very little code examples.

After looking at the API doc for the JEditorPane for a bit I tried this:

        JEditorPane jep = new JEditorPane();
        jep.setContentType("text/html");
        jep.setText("<H1>an H1 Header</H1><br><P>First para<p>Second para<p>And the Third");
        add(jep);

I'm glad you understood it.

So you just put the "text/html" string label in the setContentType method?

Do you think JEditorPane/JTextPane would recognize html coding from a text file when it got written to it?

What if you wanted to see the HTML text vs having it formatted?

No I was hoping for having it formatted. I could just simply make HTML documents and load them in... but I would prefer it to be standard text with html coding in it and have JEditorPane/JTextPane recognize the coding when the file gets read and format it.

What would a browser do when it reads that type of file?

Read it as a webpage? Or a URL?

Or did you want me to try it? I will try it....

It didn't work. I suppose the document has to be HTML then?

It didn't work.

Can you explain?
For example, I created a file that started with non html text and imbedded in it some html. I opened the file in a browser and the browser displayed ....

Placing a html text in a standard text file didn't work for me when I viewed it in a web browser. It simply showed the html code in the text file.

I did, however, get the JEditorPane to work with it. A BufferedReader reads lines from a text document with html code into a StringBuffer. Each appended line gets the "<br>" statement added on.

The StringBuffer.toString() method is then used to set the JEditorPane's text to the StringBuffer's contents.

The JEditorPane (after using the setContentType("text/html") method) shows the HTML code output successfully.

Thanks for your help!