Clear Screen

[Arthur Buliva]

I came across a certain piece of code for clearing the screen in Java:

 public class ClearScreen
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        char esc = 27;
        String clear = esc + "[2J";
        System.out.print(clear);
    }
}   

I am impressed, but left with a question. What sort of character is "[2J". Or rather, how exactly does this code work?

[Devaka Cooray]

I got the following output on DOS screen:

←[2J

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

That's an ANSI terminal escape sequence. It will work only for terminals that support them. Windows only will with the "ANSI.SYS" driver installed; most UNIX terminals support them out of the box.

[Devaka Cooray]

Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote:That's an ANSI terminal escape sequence. It will work only for terminals that support them.

Oh! I didn't aware about that.