Recently I wrote some Java hints, which simplify the work with String literals. Users of Eclipse or Intellij IDEA may recognize some of them.
New hints:
- Replace ‘+’ with ‘MessageFormat.format()’
- Replace ‘+’ with ‘new StringBuilder().append()’
- Replace ‘+’ with ‘String.format()’
- Join literals
- Copy joined literals to clipboard
- Split the String on linebreaks
Here some use-cases:
Use-case 1: “Simplify concatenation”
"Hello " + "world" can be replaced by "Hello world"
Use-case 2: “Join for localization”
When localizing your application, you often have to struggle with concatenated Strings like the following:
"Info: only " + number + " entries found"
With the help of the hints such terms can be easily replaced by
String.format("Info: only %s entries found", number) //or
MessageFormat.format("Info: only {0} entries found", number)
The generated joined literals can now be extracted more easily by the Internationalization wizard/tooling.
Use-case 3: “Developing test-cases for hints”
Copy joined literals to clipboard vs. pasting from clipboard
Join literals vs. Split on linebreaks
The plugin is compatible to NetBeans 7.2 (and above) and verified, thus it can be installed directly from your IDE. Or you can download it from [1] and install it manually.
The sourcecode is available at [2]. The infrastructure code is based on code from the “I18N Checker” plugin from Jan Lahoda [3]. Feel free to file issues or enhancements at [2].
[2] http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/47589/additional-hints
[3] https://github.com/markiewb/nb-additional-hints
[3] http://hg.netbeans.org/main/contrib/file/tip/editor.hints.i18n
