how do i remove a specific amount of whitespace within a string???(Java)

[wickster]

Hey everyone,

I am writing a program that prints out lines of information, and different lines need different indentations. So I have one string that i add whitespace to increase the indentation...

For example:

String indentation = "";

-And when i want to increase the indentation(two spaces) i just do the following:

indentation += "  ";

This works, however i want to then be able to substract whitespace from the indentation string, and i am not quite sure how to do this...

Thanks to whomever can help,
Tom

[techieMoe]

To remove all whitespace characters from the beginning and end of a string, use the trim() method. For instance, say we have a string instance called "spacesAndString":

String noSpaceString = spacesAndString.trim();

.trim() returns the string minus whitespace characters and puts it in your destination variable.

For more information, check the Sun Java documentation for String:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/index.html

[birdman]

I think you should use the substring method. By using

if(indentation.length() >= 2){
    indentation = indentation.substring(2);
}

You should be able to step up and down the indentation steps quite easily.

Regards

[drl]

Hi.

If you keep the indentation as an integer, then operations like this are probably easier. You can then set the amount of an indent separately, say, 2 spaces, 3 spaces, etc., and write the total number of spaces as "n" chunks, where "n" is the current value of indentation. This is, however, a change in how you view the problem ... cheers, drl