How to delete stuff printed to console by System.out.println()?

Question

You could print the backspace character \b as many times as the characters which were printed before.

System.out.print("hello");
Thread.sleep(1000); // Just to give the user a chance to see "hello".
System.out.print("\b\b\b\b\b");
System.out.print("world");

Note: this doesn't work flawlessly in Eclipse console in older releases before Mars (4.5). This works however perfectly fine in command console. See also How to get backspace \b to work in Eclipse's console?

Clearing screen in Java is not supported, but you can try some hacks to achieve this.

a) Use OS-depends command, like this for Windows:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cls");

b) Put bunch of new lines (this makes ilusion that screen is clear)

c) If you ever want to turn off System.out, you can try this:

System.setOut(new PrintStream(new OutputStream() {
    @Override public void write(int b) throws IOException {}
}));

You could use cursor up to delete a line, and erase text, or simply overwrite with the old text with new text.

int count = 1; 
System.out.print(String.format("\033[%dA",count)); // Move up
System.out.print("\033[2K"); // Erase line content

or clear screen

System.out.print(String.format("\033[2J"));

This is standard, but according to wikipedia the Windows console don't follow it.

Have a look: http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm

I am using blueJ for java programming. There is a way to clear the screen of it's terminal window. Try this:-

System.out.print ('\f');

this will clear whatever is printed before this line. But this does not work in command prompt.