Friday, March 4, 2011

Best pretty-printing library for Java?

What is the single best pretty-printing library for Java? I mean a library for printing formatted output with indentation, break hints, etc., not a library for beautifying/re-formatting Java code itself. Ideally, the library would "play nice" with System.out.println and friends.

For an idea of what I'm looking for, see OCaml's Format module, particularly Format.fprintf.

[UPDATE] I am not looking for a console windowing library. A pretty-printing library allows you to define methods for formatting arbitrary values such that indentation is preserved and line breaks are chosen at sensible locations. Such libraries exist for Haskell, Standard ML, OCaml, F#, and Scheme. The XTC library provides some of this functionality in xtc.tree.Printer, but it is not nearly as flexible as the libraries in other languages.

From stackoverflow
  • Is it jpplib?

  • Since you talk about boxes, break hints and so on I assume you mean to build a text-based windowing application. So I guess that you are looking for something similar to Ncurses but in Java. Maybe charva could help you.

    Chris Conway : No, I'm no developing a curses application. I just want nice, formatted output, e.g., in debugging logs. I can't find any appropriate classes in charva.
  • You may also try javacurses.

    According to Dr. Dobb's Code Talk it is cute.

    Chris Conway : That doesn't seem to do what I want.

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