Java Text Blocks
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String text = """
first line
second line
""";Introduction to Text Blocks
Text blocks let you write multi-line string literals without needing backslash line-continuation characters or endless string concatenation. A text block starts and ends with three double quotes ("""), and everything between those delimiters is preserved as written, newlines included.
Example: Introduction to Text Blocks
// Define the class Main
public class Main {
// Program entry point: the JVM starts running here
public static void main(String[] args) {
String text = """
Line one
Line two""";
// Print a line to the console
System.out.println(text);
}
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Indentation Handling
Java automatically handles indentation inside a text block: at compile time, it determines the common leading whitespace shared by every line and strips exactly that much from each one. This lets you indent a text block to match your surrounding code without that indentation leaking into the actual string value.
Example: Indentation Handling
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String text = """
Hello
World""";
System.out.println(text); // common leading whitespace is stripped
}
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Escape Sequences
You can use ordinary double quotes inside a text block without needing to escape them, since the triple-quote delimiters remove that ambiguity. If you want to write a long logical line of text without an actual line break appearing in the output, you can end that line with a backslash (\\) to suppress the newline.
Example: Escape Sequences
// Define the class Main
public class Main {
// Program entry point: the JVM starts running here
public static void main(String[] args) {
String text = """
She said "hello" without escaping. \
This line joins the one above.""";
// Print a line to the console
System.out.println(text);
}
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Dynamic Formatting
You can format values into a text block dynamically at runtime using String.format() with the block as a template, or by calling the newer formatted() instance method directly on the text block itself for equivalent behavior with cleaner syntax.
Example: Dynamic Formatting
// Define the class Main
public class Main {
// Program entry point: the JVM starts running here
public static void main(String[] args) {
String template = """
Name: %s
Age: %d""";
// Print a line to the console
System.out.println(template.formatted("Zoya", 28));
}
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Replacing HTML Templates
Text blocks make it far easier to write and maintain embedded HTML, SQL, or JSON templates directly inside Java source code, since the multi-line structure of those formats can now be preserved visually instead of being flattened into escaped, hard-to-read single-line strings.
Example: Replacing HTML Templates
// Define the class Main
public class Main {
// Program entry point: the JVM starts running here
public static void main(String[] args) {
String html = """
<html>
<body>Hello</body>
</html>""";
// Print a line to the console
System.out.println(html);
}
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- Putting text on the same line as the opening
""", such as"""Hello, which is a compile error because the content must start on the next line. - Not realizing the closing
"""position matters: if it sits on its own line the string ends with a newline and it also sets how much indentation is removed. - Writing three double quotes inside the block without escaping, as in
\""", since three in a row would end the text block.
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