Whenever you paste String in Eclipse which contains escape characters, to store in a String variable or just as
String literal it will ask to manually escape special
characters like single quotes, double quotes, forward slash, etc. This
problem is more prominent when you are pasting a large chunk of data which
contains escape characters like a whole HTML or XML
file, which contains lots of single quotes
e.g. ‘’ and double quotes “” along with forwarding slash on closing tags. It’s
very hard to manually escape all those characters and it's pretty annoying as well.
While writing JUnit
test for XML documents, parsing, and processing I prefer to have the whole XML
file as String in the Unit test, which pointed me to look for that feature in
Eclipse.
As I said earlier in my post Top 30 Eclipse keyboard shortcuts, I always look to find new shortcuts and settings in Eclipse which help to automate repetitive tasks. Thankfully Eclipse has one setting which automatically escapes text as soon as you paste it.
This is even more useful if you prefer to copy the file path and just paste it, Since windows use forward slash it automatically escape that instead of you going manually and escaping them. By default, this setting is disabled in Eclipse IDE and you need to enable it.
Btw, if you are a beginner, I suggest you first go through a beginner course like Eclipse Tutorials for Beginners to understand the core concepts of Eclipse IDE and get yourself familiar with UI and essential features. Learning plugins will be a lot easier after that.
As I said earlier in my post Top 30 Eclipse keyboard shortcuts, I always look to find new shortcuts and settings in Eclipse which help to automate repetitive tasks. Thankfully Eclipse has one setting which automatically escapes text as soon as you paste it.
This is even more useful if you prefer to copy the file path and just paste it, Since windows use forward slash it automatically escape that instead of you going manually and escaping them. By default, this setting is disabled in Eclipse IDE and you need to enable it.
Btw, if you are a beginner, I suggest you first go through a beginner course like Eclipse Tutorials for Beginners to understand the core concepts of Eclipse IDE and get yourself familiar with UI and essential features. Learning plugins will be a lot easier after that.
How to enable automatic escaping while pasting text as String literal in Eclipse :
Here are the steps you need to perform to enable this setting in Eclipse
which will automatically provide escaping required in Java for special
characters like quotes, slashes, etc.
1. Open Eclipse IDE
2. Go to Windows --> Preferences --> Java --> Editor -->
Typing
3) check the check box "Escape text when pasting into a
String literal" on section "In String literals.
This will escape text when pasted as String literal. Do it now, it's an
option worth enabling and I just wonder why not Eclipse IDE makes this option
enabled by default. Believe me, it's extremely useful but same time hard to
discover.
Here is a screenshot of this option. As you can see, by default this option is not enabled.
Next time no need to extra edit any XML or HTML text before pasting it as
String literal in Eclipse IDE. The eclipse will do it for you automatically. Once
again, if you are doing anything manually and think that it would be good
Eclipse can assist on that task, look for it using google or Eclipse help.
There is a good chance you can discover a useful Eclipse shortcut or settings.
Other Eclipse tutorials and tips for Java programmer
6 comments :
Very Informative..
thanks man you saved my day
Thanks man.. It really save my time. Great help.. :) :)
Thanks, I wanted the opposite: pasting \t UNchanged to \\t
Just don't use this shortcut? doesn't that work?
Thank you. This was a big time saver
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