TextArea line break at /-character

Targets macOS
1

Hello,
I am displaying Base64-encoded strings in a textarea. When the TextArea is not wide enough to display the string on a single line and the string contains a „/“-character, then the line breaks at that position. This does not look good, especially if the strings are longer and containing a couple of „/"-characters.

Example:
Make a TextArea (TextArea1) 300 pixels wide.
In the action Event of a button ad this code:

TextArea1.Text = "ThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongString"

Result after pushing the button: The string fills up the entire width of the TextArea, then it continues in the next line.

Now change the code into:

TextArea1.Text = "This/IsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongStringThisIsAVeryLongString"

Note that there is a „/“-character after the first „This“.
Result after pushing the button: In the first line of the TextArea we have only „This/“ (the rest of the line is empty). The next part of the string begins in the second line of the textarea.

How can I avoid that lines in a TextArea break at the “/” character?

2

looks like you can’t… it seems to wrap on non alphanumeric characters if the next “section” exceeds the current line

in your example “This/” is 5 char long, but the rest of the string exceeds the width of the TextArea, so it starts a new line

I would bet this same behaviour will happen with other characters as well that are NOT [A-Z or 0-9]

3

FYI this does the same thing in TextEdit
I think there’s a setting you can declare into that will turn off breaking lines at non alphanumeric characters

4

Norman and Dave,
thanks for your replies.
Ok, so there is no setting that I did not notice, that controls this behaviour in TextArea. After entering some long strings with the “/”-character into the „textarea“ of other applications I see the same behaviour. So the Xojo-TextArea does the „normal“ or „expected“ thing. I did not notice this in other apps until now, probably because I usually do not often write long strings with Base64 encoding :wink:
It seems that I found a work around by displaying these strings in a html-textarea (https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_textarea.asp) using a Xojo-HtmlViewer. The html-textarea does not seem to wrap on the „/“-character. So I can create the necessary html code (let’s call it „htmlString“) on the fly an then do:
HTMLViewer.LoadPage(htmlString, Nil)

5

Hello,
in case that someone else also stumbles upon this problem, here is a little demo project (https://cmezes.com/dl/HTML-Textarea.zip) as a starting point of how to fake a TextArea with the HTMLViewer. Note: I did only test this on macOS…