Sybex829. How to distinguish essential and incidental white space?

Imagine a vertical line drawn on the leftmost non-whitespace character in your text block. Everything to the left of it is incidental whitespace, and everything to the right is essential whitespace.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Remember that the definitive guide is the Java® Language Specification (=JLS). That tells you that the whitespace is stripped by the same algorithm as String#stripIndent(). Have a look at that method; the rules are too complicated to copy.

Anil Philip wrote:. . .
OUTPUT:

|
    green
        yellow
|

I have to resort to screenshots because copy-paste is changing the indent

My JShell wrote:jshell> var block = """
  ...>        
  ...>                 green
  ...>                     yellow
  ...>             """;
block ==> "\n    green\n        yellow\n"

jshell>

jshell> var block = """
  ...>
  ...>      green
  ...>         yellow
  ...> """;
block ==> "\n     green\n        yellow\n"

jshell> f14();
|
    green
        yellow
|

. . . Is the "leftmost non-whitespace character in your text block" the 'g'? . . .

A few minutes ago, I wrote:. . . It depends on whether the book shows the """ at the left margin or not . . .

Campbell Ritchie wrote:

A few minutes ago, I wrote:. . . It depends on whether the book shows the """ at the left margin or not . . .

Have another look at your screenshot and you will see whether the delimiters are up against the left margin, and whether you added incidental whitespace when you wrote the f14() method.

Anil Philip wrote:I am trying to understand which of the blocks below have incidental whitespace, which have essential whitespace, and which have both.

Ron McLeod wrote:This document on the Oracle web site offers a good explanation: Programmer's Guide to Text Blocks

Anil Philip wrote:. . . I am using IntelliJ so I guess it isn't monospaced.

. . . See screenshots:

Campbell Ritchie wrote: only monospaced on the Ranch if you use the monospaced button, which has “tt” on.

. . . See screenshots:

I can't; the screenshots disappear from the reply screen. Screenshots have lots of problems which you wouldn't have if you used text. And please don't write such long lines in code tags..

Anil Philip wrote:. . . I don't know how you cannot see screenshots . . .

Anil Philip wrote:Is the "leftmost non-whitespace character in your text block" the 'g'?

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:

Anil Philip wrote:Is the "leftmost non-whitespace character in your text block" the 'g'?

Np

var block = """ """; // the quote on this line is where you draw the imaginary line