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Transform a unformatted paragraph to a multiple-line length-limited paragraph

 
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I want to take an unformatted paragraph of text and transform it in to multiple lines (line breaks on word boundaries only), with the content of each line not exceeding a specified maximum length.  I also optionally want to be able to specify a string to prefix each line (I'm calling this indentation).

I am solving this using a collector which consumes a stream of words and produces a formatted string.  Internally the collector uses a list of StringBuilder objects which are created dynamically during the processing.

Functionally it is working as expected, but I am wanting to get some feedback on the design/implementation.  For example - would you solve this problem differently?  Would you use StringBuilders or something more primitive?

Here's what I did:
Test:
Output:
 
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This sounds like something I did a long time ago. I can't track it down now, maybe it was for work but I don't think so. Anyway I used (or thought of using) a java.text.BreakIterator which sounds a lot like your requirement.
 
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I came up with a shorter form using regex:
 
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In other words, you're looking to implement a bog-standard old-time text formatting utility.

You've got 2 possible strategies here. One is to use a scanner to break the text down into tokens and keep appending tokens into a StringBuilder until you reach the limit, then output the StringBuilder contents as a String. Reset the StringBuilder to empty and start appending from there. There really isn't anything more primitive that StringBuilder in Java.

The other is faster, but maybe a bit more brutal - use a regex to suck up as large a set of characters from the source string(s) as will fill out the StringBuilder buffer, rinse and repeat until you run out of sources.

And, of course, either way, don't forget to flush out the buffer at the end! (I always forget).

The regex way is probably more performant and more likely to preserve non-semantic constructs such as multiple adjacent spaces (depending on how your scanner works). The scanner, on the other hand, can be more intelligent about how it handles tokens. And, unlike regex'es is less likely to injure your sanity. So it's a matter of which suits you better.
 
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Tim Holloway wrote:You've got 2 possible strategies here. One is to use a scanner to break the text down into tokens and keep appending tokens into a StringBuilder until you reach the limit, then output the StringBuilder contents as a String. Reset the StringBuilder to empty and start appending from there. There really isn't anything more primitive that StringBuilder in Java.


That is basically what I did, but as a stream collector.
 
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Just a thought (and I having tried it), I don't think any of these solutions handle when a "word" is longer than the maximum characters per line.
 
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Knute Snortum wrote:Just a thought (and I having tried it), I don't think any of these solutions handle when a "word" is longer than the maximum characters per line.



I'll take "Things that will 'never' happen for $20", Alex.

Yep. Something that I usually do pay attention to when designing algorithms of that sort. Much to Management's annoyance.

The accepted solution is to simply break the work. You can do that crudely, by just snapping the two (or more!) segments apart, or you can back up 1 and append a word-continuation hyphen on the affected line.

OR you can get really fancy and try and backtrack to a syllable boundary. Although assuming your output lines are a civilized length (60 characters or so), the English language doesn't have a lot of potential offenders and therefore syllable-backtracking isn't likely to be worth it. Not so sure about German, though. Different syllabification rules there, anyway, I'd expect. And stuff like code samples is quite another matter.
 
Paul Clapham
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Paul Clapham wrote:This sounds like something I did a long time ago. I can't track it down now, maybe it was for work but I don't think so. Anyway I used (or thought of using) a java.text.BreakIterator which sounds a lot like your requirement.



I just remembered why I didn't end up using that class -- it was because my data was going to be rendered by fonts which might not be fixed-width fonts.
 
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Tim Holloway wrote:Although assuming your output lines are a civilized length (60 characters or so), the English language doesn't have a lot of potential offenders and therefore syllable-backtracking isn't likely to be worth it.


Well, I was thinking of very-long-over-hyphenated-pseudo-adjectives or a list like Democrat/Republican/Independent/Green/Pacific/Socialist/Communist, any list of words that don't have spaces between them.
 
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Knute Snortum wrote:

Tim Holloway wrote:Although assuming your output lines are a civilized length (60 characters or so), the English language doesn't have a lot of potential offenders and therefore syllable-backtracking isn't likely to be worth it.


Well, I was thinking of very-long-over-hyphenated-pseudo-adjectives or a list like Democrat/Republican/Independent/Green/Pacific/Socialist/Communist, any list of words that don't have spaces between them.



As long as you know what you're getting, though, adding a word-breaker function should be fairly easy. In fact I think I've run into a text formatter or two that specifically supported plug-in word-breakers.
 
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