What is the use of formfeed and backspace escape strings in Java?

Is there any practical usage for \r and \b in Java? Could someone give an example w开发者_JAVA百科here it's used?

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Formfeed escape is \f, not \r. The former is useful for clearing the screen in a console, whilst the second is useful for progress displays (as stated by aioobe).

\b can be used in progress displays also, for example, on a ICMP Ping, you could display a dot when a ping is sent and a \b when it is received to indicate the amount of packet loss.

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I usually use \r together with System.out.print when printing some progress percentage.

Try running this in your terminal:

class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
            System.out.print("Progress: " + i + " %\r");
            Thread.sleep(100);
        }
    }
}

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Form feed is \f and \r is carriage return. \f is used for printing characters after it from new line starting just below previous character.

System.out.println("This is before\fNow new line");
System.out.println("TEXTBEFORE\rOverlap");
System.out.println("12\b3");

Output:

This is before
          Now new line
OverlapORE
13

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Form feed is a page-breaking ASCII control character. It forces the printer to eject the current page and to continue printing at the top of another. Often, it will also cause a carriage return. For further details click here