Printing tab characters

[Gaurav Chikara]

I have tab characters stored as delemitors in a string like

String str = "\t\t";

When I use Printstream and try to print tab .My intention is to created tab seperations in file but
when i see file comes up like this

M\t\tVIRSA_CC_GENOBJ

But when I use ps.write("\t\t"); (Putting value directly in printstream
My results are correct as expected

M VIRSA_CC_GENOBJ


Is there a way we can get the first case working ?

Thanks in advance

[Mos Jeff]

tab characters are ASCII characters (ASCII 0x09), not Strings, try using Java's Formatter class through String.format.

String tab = String.format("%c", '\t');

[Wouter Oet]

Can you post the code that causes the wrong output?

[marc weber]

Gaurav Chikara wrote:...when I use ps.write("\t\t"); ... results are correct as expected...

I'm a little confused about how you're successfully using ps.write("\t\t"), because PrintStream's write method using a String parameter is private.

The public write methods take an int or a byte[]. Regarding these, the API says, "Note that the bytes will be written as given; to write characters that will be translated according to the platform's default character encoding, use the print(char) or println(char) methods."

So can you use a print method instead?

The following works for me (using the print method with a String parameter)...

import java.io.*;

class Tabs {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
      String t = "\t\t";
      PrintStream ps = new PrintStream("tabs.txt");
      ps.print("A" + t + "B");
      ps.print("C\t\tD");
    } catch(Exception e) {
      System.err.println(e);
    }
  }
}

Or am I missing something obvious...?