Thread: JTextArea windows friendly line break

Hi there.

I have a JTextArea in a little GUI application. The user has the possibility to save the text from this area to disk in a simple txt file.
Problem is, the line break character used by the JTextArea is not a windows friendly line break.
The text document shows the line breaks correctly when opening the files with "good" editing software like Notepad++, etc, but the good old standard ms editor does not display line breaks at all.

My question is, can I somehow change this behavior of the JTextArea? I would like to use "\r\n" which should work with all machines instead of just using "\r" or "\n".
I know that I could manually go over the text and change all occurances of the character "\r" to "\r\n" and "\n" to "\r\n", but I would rather not do that if such functionality already exists.

Thank you very much for the answers.

You should be able to initialize a line feed/carriage return character for the host OS using

System.getProperty( "line.separator" );

Let us know how it works out.

But how would that help me to change the way the JTextArea works? Or am I missing something?

I haven't completely thought it through, but using that (maybe), with this link "Newlines" on the JTextArea API, and the discussion at the destination, Class DefaultEditorKit, something should be possible to either influence how the JTextArea operates, or how the host OS responds to how it operates. There also might be something to be done with the underlying Document Model.

Some pieces to consider, but not a final answer.

I see.
That link was very helpful, thank you very much.

The article says that:

When a document is loaded, EndOfLineStringProperty is set appropriately, and when the document is written back out, the EndOfLineStringProperty is used. But while the document is in memory, the "\n" character is used to define a newline, regardless of how the newline is defined when the document is on disk.

So there is no way to change the behavior of the getText() method. I either use the document that is backing the JTextArea or I replace those strings myself.