&nbsp character not displaying correctly in Java

Question

I have tried "  " to display two spaces in a standard output Java String. Trying System.out.println("__"); <---- (two spaces, but, obviously, it trims it down to one space, hence the underscore)

I imagine there is a way to escape the  , but I can not figure it out nor find help online. Searching for it is ironic because a lot of literal    show up.

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT:

for (int j = 0; j < COLUMNS; j++)
  if (j < 10){
    r += "__";
  }

produces 10 spaces, not 20 like expected when printed

sorry I am still new at formatting here

Answer 1

  is an HTML-specific encoding.

You were right first time - the Java string that corresponds to two spaces is simply two space characters, e.g.

String s = "  ";

The println() call that you tried ought to have worked. What did you do that led you to believe it was trimmed down to a single space? I think your problem is elsewhere...

EDIT:

Based on your code snippet - is COLUMNS 5, by any chance? :-)

EDIT AGAIN:

OK, if COLUMNS is 15 then this code will result in r having twenty spaces appended to it. If you want to be really sure you can either step through in a debugger or put a logging statement above the r += line to see for sure how many times the statement is called.

Also have a look at how r is used later on before its output is printed to the place you're inspecting; perhaps its value is truncated at some point, either explicitly in Java or perhaps even implicitly (such as being stored in a database column that's 10 characters too narrow before being retrieved and displayed later).

Answer 2

You don't need to use &nbsp in Java. System.out.print(" "); should do the trick. Try something like:

System.out.print("This is the a string before spaces" + "  " + "this is a string after spaces");

Answer 3

If you want a non-breaking space in your string, for whatever reason, you have to use the Unicode literal:

System.out.println("banana\u00A0phone");

Answer 4

You can also create a non-breaking space by holding the Alt key and typing 0160 on the number pad.