Try to solve Java multiline string editing problem

Many times, we need to write large sections or strings that need to be escaped in the code. Common situations include: SQL, regular expressions, XML/HTML, quoting a large section of text, etc.

Unfortunately, So far, Java has not provided a language-level support for multi-line strings. When writing these strings, I have to insert a lot of escape characters: \rn ", and they need to be connected with +. It is troublesome to write and difficult to understand, especially the regular expression itself contains many needs Escaped characters. It is said that in Java 7, someone once suggested using """ to implement it. I don't know why, but finally nothing happened.

Although we have no solution at the language level yet, we can achieve ideal results through the IDE editor. Eclipse plug-in: The basic idea of ​​Multiple-line syntax is to use Javadoc to achieve multi-line writing, so that the existing Java syntax structure does not need to be destroyed. The general principle is:

When saving Java files, there will be special The marked javadoc is converted into a Java format string, and this code is specially marked. When reading the Java file, the reverse operation is performed, and the specially marked Java code is converted into Javadoc. In this way, in What we see under the IDE is a clean multi-line string, which can be edited and saved normally. The actual source code is still a bunch of escaping and concatenation codes that look very verbose. But it doesn’t matter, out of sight, out of mind! As long as it can be executed normally and output the content we want, everything will be OK.

Example screenshot: