Thread Safety of JTextArea.append

Question

The java doc says the append method is thread safe. However, I recall that when I tried using the append to the text area from different threads (several months ago), I get jumbled text where thread 1 would append some characters and thread 2 would append some other characters. So instead of getting STRINGstring in the jtextarea, I get SstTrRINingG.

What differences would there be between:

synchronizing the append
bottlenecking appends from different threads through a threadpoolexecutor
using invokeLater on the EDT

or are they all fine for fixing the issue? Thanks

I see the doc says that it's thread safe but it also says, "Please see How to Use Threads for more information." — Bhesh Gurung, Dec 08 '11 at 20:10
There's a related example [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3245805/230513). — trashgod, Dec 08 '11 at 20:39
I never see that, just do not believe, in Java + Unicode (UTF-8/16), can you please post http://sscce.org/ — mKorbel, Dec 08 '11 at 20:47

trashgod · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-08T20:40:48.020

7

While append() was thread safe with respect to the EDT, append() in Java 7 is not. Appends using invokeLater() will be processed in the order in which they are enqueued. A critical examination of the other approaches would require an sscce.

edited Dec 08 '11 at 20:40

answered Dec 08 '11 at 20:21

trashgod

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 08 '11 at 20:12

1

All your solutions seem ok to me. Since you will need to use some form of Invoke to update the UI anyway, it's probably best to just use invokeLater to avoid any other complications.

answered Dec 08 '11 at 20:12

Tudor

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Thread Safety of JTextArea.append

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