JEP 355 Text Blocks, final new-line CR

[interlink.sg7 at gmail.com]

Hello,

 

This ist the first time I'm writing to the OpenJDK devs and I'm not sure if
this is the correct place to do so, I apologise if it isn't.

I recently saw the <Programmer's Guide To Text Blocks>
(http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jlaskey/Strings/TextBlocksGuide_v8.html).

First I'm really glad that you moved away from the String Literal proposal
and especially that you're not planning to to use the backtick as marker
anymore.

The backtick is a dead-key on many keyboards and would be inconvenient to
type.

 

However I was quite bothered that newlines are added at the end of
textblocks when the end-marker (""") is on a new line.

 

Is there a good reason for this?

 

I think developers would have some benefits if it wouldn't do that. In
consequence the end-marker would need to on its own line, the same way as
the start-marker

needs to be followed by a line-terminator.

 

- An automatic final newline is often not desirable. E.g. HTML or SQL or
prose that we wish to include as a textblock. Some examples in the
<Programmer's Guide To Text Blocks> seem to be unnaturally constructed to
fit the resulting textblocks.

- The final newline it is even in the way. E.g. Valid Python code or when
concatenating two textblocks. Without newlines at the end, concatenation
would feel similar as we are used to it now.

- It's harder and inconvenient to remove a newline after creating the
textblock. The textblock will often be used as a static final constant
field. There's is currently no easy way to do this with the JDK alone. It
would require import to org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils::chomp. In
contrast it would be easy to add a final newline if it was really required.
Simply adding an empty line before the end-marker.

- <What you see is what you get>. The resulting String would always entail
the textblock between the markers. If there's a final newline, it would be
clearly visible as a newline in the block.

- Singleline textblocks would be visually appealing. It would be and look
consistent with multiline textblocks. You could express indents in
singleline textblocks without having to use String::indent after creation.

 

For examples:

private static final String PARAGRAPH = """

 
<p>"This is a paragraph!"</p>

                                                                        """;

 

Would result in:

|    <p>"This is a paragraph!"</p>

 

Kind regards,

 

Simon