How to fit a long String into a JLabel

Question

as the title says: I need to fit a JLabel into a JFrame, but the text in the JLabel are too long, so I need to add some linebreaks. The text in the JLabel are obtained from an online XML file, so i cant just change the text to contain linebreaks.

This code extracts data from the XML-file

Element element = (Element)nodes1.item(i);
            String vær = getElementValue(element,"body");
            String v = vær.replaceAll("<.*>", "" );  
            String forecast = "Vær: " + v;

in this case the string I want to add some linebreaks to the string v. The String v contains the parsed data from the xml file. The String forecast is returned and set as a text to the JLabel.

Just ask if something is uncleared, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I suggest using a JTextArea instead and turning wrapping on. The only way to do it in a JLabel is to put line breaks <br />, which wouldn't work (at least not easily) in your situation if you don't know the text beforehand.

JTextArea is much more flexible. By default it looks different, but you can fiddle around with some of the display properties to make it look like a JLabel.

---

A simple modified usage example taken from the How to Use Text Areas tutorial -

public class JTextAreaDemo {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {         
                createAndShowGUI();
            }
        });
    }

    private static void createAndShowGUI(){
        final JFrame frame = new JFrame("JTextArea Demo");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

        final JPanel panel = new JPanel();
        JTextArea textArea = new JTextArea(
                "If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse " +
                "than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who " +
                "doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.", 
                6, 
                20);
        textArea.setFont(new Font("Serif", Font.ITALIC, 16));
        textArea.setLineWrap(true);
        textArea.setWrapStyleWord(true);
        textArea.setOpaque(false);
        textArea.setEditable(false);

        panel.add(textArea);
        frame.add(panel);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}