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Java

Posted by Ian Z
Ian Z
14,584 Points

Project i completed after what i learned from treehouse AND What is going on in my .toString() method? pics included

Heres project i made, it stores all the books in my imaginary bookstore and lets me search based on some properties. I made it in netbeans with Swing GUI my screenshot/ image link

Theres one thing i dont understand and thats the .toString() used to print books to the Text Area as you can see in this picture SOMETIMES the text listens to the \t and sometimes it doesnt, and sometimes it ignores the difference in title length and sometimes it dosent, any ideas whats going on? Also the \t dosent work at all after author and price field

my screenshot/ image link

heres code for .toString()

public String toString( ){
        String string = "Title: " + title +",\t \t"+ "Author: " + author + ",\t"+ 
             "Price: " + price + ",\t"+ "Is a Hardcover: " + isHardcover + ",\t"+ "ISBN: " + ISBN;
        return string;
    }

and it is called here when "Show All Books" button is pressed

textArea.setText("");
        textArea.setText("Our Library contains: \n");
        textArea.append(bs.toString());

Edit: heres more pics of this Strange phenomena my screenshot/ image link

And another pic my screenshot/ image link

Craig Dennis

Steve Hunter
Steve Hunter
57,712 Points

OK - so you build up a long string with tabs inserted to try to maintain a column-like format. But some titles and authors etc. are longer than others so the tabs are overflowing and breaching the column alignment?

There's probably a neater way of doing that with some interpolation, but this is doing the job, isn't it?

Steve.

Ian Z
Ian Z
14,584 Points

your right ideally ill probably change it to columns with labels or something- but isnt it weird how it ignores the difference in length of some titles and sets the Author in the perfect location and on others it doesnt? its just Alien and makes no sense to me, it should be very slightly jagged with first couple of lines and not so perfect

Ian Z
Ian Z
14,584 Points

Edit: added more Pics Also: this happens not only in Swing JTextArea but also in console

1 Answer

Craig Dennis
STAFF
Craig Dennis
Treehouse Teacher
Craig Dennis
Craig Dennis
Treehouse Teacher

Whoa Ian! So awesome! Please share the code when you are happy with it!

One thing we haven't talked about yet is that String.format can do padding:

java> String.format("%-20s %-20s", "Column 1", "Column 2");                    
java.lang.String res1 = "Column 1             Column 2            "

Here's the docs on Formatters

Ian Z
Ian Z
14,584 Points

Cool i didnt know about formatters and this helped me to get it working, however i still had to use the /t to make everything perfectly straight,

from what i read online the /t will automatically push the text to the next tab marking? so the page is split up into /t /t /t /t and i just formatted them all to be big enough so they snapped to same T

Ben Jakuben
Ben Jakuben
Treehouse Teacher
Ben Jakuben
Ben Jakuben
Treehouse Teacher

Awesome work, Ian! Thanks for sharing! :)