Newline in JLabel

Question

How can I display a newline in JLabel?

For example, if I wanted:

Hello World!
blahblahblah

This is what I have right now:

JLabel l = new JLabel("Hello World!\nblahblahblah", SwingConstants.CENTER);

This is what is displayed:

Hello World!blahblahblah

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, I'm just learning some Swing basics...

Definitely not a dumb question. Took me a while to figure out html was possible in swing too. — Simon Baars, Mar 16 '17 at 07:51

score 198 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 11 '17 at 23:15

198

Surround the string with <html></html> and break the lines with <br/>.

JLabel l = new JLabel("<html>Hello World!<br/>blahblahblah</html>", SwingConstants.CENTER);

edited Dec 11 '17 at 23:15

Nathan

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answered Jul 07 '09 at 02:33

freitass

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just a little correction: use
instead of just
... this is recommended way of doing it (to not miss any closing tags)...happy coding... – Nitin Bansal Apr 18 '12 at 05:50
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@NitinBansal Actually it's recommended in the new version of HTML to leave it as
. It's called a void tag.
still works for backwards compatibility. – gsgx Apr 27 '12 at 03:50
@gsingh2011 : ok...thats better :-) – Nitin Bansal Apr 27 '12 at 15:43
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Any idea WHY JLabel's don't support newlines by default? – ApproachingDarknessFish Jul 02 '13 at 00:33
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You actually don't even have to close the html tag. If you need to append text on runtime, this simplifies it a lot! – Roberto Oct 11 '15 at 17:35

TheSola10 · Answer 2 · 2016-04-23T19:16:10.537

You can try and do this:

myLabel.setText("<html>" + myString.replaceAll("<","&lt;").replaceAll(">", "&gt;").replaceAll("\n", "<br/>") + "</html>")

The advantages of doing this are:

It replaces all newlines with <br/>, without fail.
It automatically replaces eventual < and > with < and > respectively, preventing some render havoc.

What it does is:

"<html>" + adds an opening html tag at the beginning
.replaceAll("<", "<").replaceAll(">", ">") escapes < and > for convenience
.replaceAll("\n", "<br/>") replaces all newlines by br (HTML line break) tags for what you wanted
... and + "</html>" closes our html tag at the end.

P.S.: I'm very sorry to wake up such an old post, but whatever, you have a reliable snippet for your Java!

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 07 '09 at 07:43

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You can use the MultilineLabel component in the Jide Open Source Components.

http://www.jidesoft.com/products/oss.htm

answered Jul 07 '09 at 07:43

Aakash

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Uri · Answer 4 · 2011-04-18T16:39:50.273

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JLabel is actually capable of displaying some rudimentary HTML, which is why it is not responding to your use of the newline character (unlike, say, System.out).

If you put in the corresponding HTML and used <BR>, you would get your newlines.

edited Apr 18 '11 at 16:39

answered Jul 07 '09 at 02:39

Uri

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*sigh* I tried to add backticks to escape your html, however it says I can't edit unless I'm adding at least 6 characters. – AnnanFay Apr 16 '11 at 00:13
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@Annan That isn't necessary in HTML. What you're talking about is for supporting XHTML. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1946426/html-5-is-it-br-br-or-br – arkon May 11 '13 at 17:03
@b1naryatr0phy na, the problem was fixed :) The original post had a literal `
` tag which was formatted by stack-overflow as a literal line break in the post. – AnnanFay May 13 '13 at 04:50

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 08 '11 at 13:10

2

You can do

JLabel l = new JLabel("<html><p>Hello World! blah blah blah</p></html>", SwingConstants.CENTER);

and it will automatically wrap it where appropriate.

answered Feb 08 '11 at 13:10

nevster

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score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 04 '11 at 15:56

Thanks Aakash for recommending JIDE MultilineLabel. JIDE's StyledLabel is also enhanced recently to support multiple line. I would recommend it over the MultilineLabel as it has many other great features. You can check out an article on StyledLabel below. It is still free and open source.

http://www.jidesoft.com/articles/StyledLabel.pdf

Newline in JLabel

6 Answers6

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