New Line character \n not displaying properly in textView Android

Question

I know that if you do something like

myTextView.setText("This is on first line \n This is on second line");

Then it will display properly like this:

This is on first line
This is on second line

When I store that string in a database and then set it to the view it displays as such:

This is on first line \n This is on second line

Here is the line of code I use to extract the string from the database:

factView.setText(factsCursor.getString(MyDBAdapter.FACT_COLUMN));

I simply populate the database from a text file where each line is a new entry into the table so a line would look like this "This is on first line \n This is on second line" and it is stored as text.

Is there a reason that it isn't displaying the \n characters properly? It must be something to do with the string being in the database. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

As Falmarri said in his comment, your string is being escaped when it is put into the database. You could try and unescape the string by calling String s = unescape(stringFromDatabase) before you place it in your TextView.

As a side note, make sure you are using DatabaseUtils.sqlEscapeString() on any kind of data that is from the user or an unknown changeable source when inserting data into the database. This will protect you from errors and SQL Injection.

Answer 2

I found this question Austyn Mahoney's answer is correct but here's a little help:

   private String unescape(String description) {
    return description.replaceAll("\\\\n", "\\\n");
}

description being the string coming out of your SQLite DB

Answer 3

Try \\n instead of \n. If it throws an exception than use newline keyword in place of \n....newline is one character, ascii 10; it's often entered in a string literal...and will serve your purpose....:)

Answer 4

"This is on first line"||x'0A'||"This is on second line"

The || concatenates strings and the x'0A' is an unescaped newline.

If you're inserting records you'll have to replace every newline with "||x'0A'||" (If your string is double quoted). This may seem clumsy compared to the other asnswers. However if your lines are in separate columns this also works in a select:

SELECT firstline||x'0A'||secondline FROM wherever;

I found this while having the same problem you are: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg43557.html