A text component to edit various kinds of content. You can find how-to information and examples of using editor panes in Using Text Components, a section in The Java Tutorial.

This component uses implementations of the EditorKit to accomplish its behavior. It effectively morphs into the proper kind of text editor for the kind of content it is given. The content type that editor is bound to at any given time is determined by the EditorKit currently installed. If the content is set to a new URL, its type is used to determine the EditorKit that should be used to load the content.

By default, the following types of content are known:

text/plain

Plain text, which is the default the type given isn't recognized. The kit used in this case is an extension of DefaultEditorKit that produces a wrapped plain text view.

text/html

HTML text. The kit used in this case is the class javax.swing.text.html.HTMLEditorKit which provides HTML 3.2 support.

text/rtf

RTF text. The kit used in this case is the class javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFEditorKit which provides a limited support of the Rich Text Format.

There are several ways to load content into this component.

1. The setText method can be used to initialize the component from a string. In this case the current EditorKit will be used, and the content type will be expected to be of this type.
2. The read method can be used to initialize the component from a Reader. Note that if the content type is HTML, relative references (e.g. for things like images) can't be resolved unless the <base> tag is used or the Base property on HTMLDocument is set. In this case the current EditorKit will be used, and the content type will be expected to be of this type.
3. The setPage method can be used to initialize the component from a URL. In this case, the content type will be determined from the URL, and the registered EditorKit for that content type will be set.

Some kinds of content may provide hyperlink support by generating hyperlink events. The HTML EditorKit will generate hyperlink events if the JEditorPane is not editable (JEditorPane.setEditable(false); has been called). If HTML frames are embedded in the document, the typical response would be to change a portion of the current document. The following code fragment is a possible hyperlink listener implementation, that treats HTML frame events specially, and simply displays any other activated hyperlinks.

     class Hyperactive implements HyperlinkListener {
 
         public void hyperlinkUpdate(HyperlinkEvent e) {
             if (e.getEventType() == HyperlinkEvent.EventType.ACTIVATED) {
                 JEditorPane pane = (JEditorPane) e.getSource();
                 if (e instanceof HTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent) {
                     HTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent  evt = (HTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent)e;
                     HTMLDocument doc = (HTMLDocument)pane.getDocument();
                     doc.processHTMLFrameHyperlinkEvent(evt);
                 } else {
                     try {
                         pane.setPage(e.getURL());
                     } catch (Throwable t) {
                         t.printStackTrace();
                     }
                 }
             }
         }
     }

For information on customizing how text/html is rendered please see W3C_LENGTH_UNITS and HONOR_DISPLAY_PROPERTIES

Culturally dependent information in some documents is handled through a mechanism called character encoding. Character encoding is an unambiguous mapping of the members of a character set (letters, ideographs, digits, symbols, or control functions) to specific numeric code values. It represents the way the file is stored. Example character encodings are ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-5, Shift-jis, Euc-jp, and UTF-8. When the file is passed to an user agent (JEditorPane) it is converted to the document character set (ISO-10646 aka Unicode).

There are multiple ways to get a character set mapping to happen with JEditorPane.

1. One way is to specify the character set as a parameter of the MIME type. This will be established by a call to the setContentType method. If the content is loaded by the setPage method the content type will have been set according to the specification of the URL. It the file is loaded directly, the content type would be expected to have been set prior to loading.
2. Another way the character set can be specified is in the document itself. This requires reading the document prior to determining the character set that is desired. To handle this, it is expected that the EditorKit.read operation throw a ChangedCharSetException which will be caught. The read is then restarted with a new Reader that uses the character set specified in the ChangedCharSetException (which is an IOException).

Newlines

For a discussion on how newlines are handled, see DefaultEditorKit.

Warning: Swing is not thread safe. For more information see Swing's Threading Policy.

Warning: Serialized objects of this class will not be compatible with future Swing releases. The current serialization support is appropriate for short term storage or RMI between applications running the same version of Swing. As of 1.4, support for long term storage of all JavaBeans™ has been added to the java.beans package. Please see XMLEncoder.

Key for a client property used to indicate whether w3c compliant length units are used for html rendering.

By default this is not enabled; to enable it set the client property with this name to Boolean.TRUE.

Key for a client property used to indicate whether the default font and foreground color from the component are used if a font or foreground color is not specified in the styled text.

The default varies based on the look and feel; to enable it set the client property with this name to Boolean.TRUE.

Sets the current URL being displayed. The content type of the pane is set, and if the editor kit for the pane is non-null, then a new default document is created and the URL is read into it. If the URL contains and reference location, the location will be scrolled to by calling the scrollToReference method. If the desired URL is the one currently being displayed, the document will not be reloaded. To force a document reload it is necessary to clear the stream description property of the document. The following code shows how this can be done:

Document doc = jEditorPane.getDocument();
   doc.putProperty(Document.StreamDescriptionProperty, null);

This may load either synchronously or asynchronously depending upon the document returned by the EditorKit. If the Document is of type AbstractDocument and has a value returned by AbstractDocument.getAsynchronousLoadPriority that is greater than or equal to zero, the page will be loaded on a separate thread using that priority.

If the document is loaded synchronously, it will be filled in with the stream prior to being installed into the editor with a call to setDocument, which is bound and will fire a property change event. If an IOException is thrown the partially loaded document will be discarded and neither the document or page property change events will be fired. If the document is successfully loaded and installed, a view will be built for it by the UI which will then be scrolled if necessary, and then the page property change event will be fired.

If the document is loaded asynchronously, the document will be installed into the editor immediately using a call to setDocument which will fire a document property change event, then a thread will be created which will begin doing the actual loading. In this case, the page property change event will not be fired by the call to this method directly, but rather will be fired when the thread doing the loading has finished. It will also be fired on the event-dispatch thread. Since the calling thread can not throw an IOException in the event of failure on the other thread, the page property change event will be fired when the other thread is done whether the load was successful or not.

Fetches a stream for the given URL, which is about to be loaded by the setPage method. By default, this simply opens the URL and returns the stream. This can be reimplemented to do useful things like fetch the stream from a cache, monitor the progress of the stream, etc.

This method is expected to have the the side effect of establishing the content type, and therefore setting the appropriate EditorKit to use for loading the stream.

If this the stream was an http connection, redirects will be followed and the resulting URL will be set as the Document.StreamDescriptionProperty so that relative URL's can be properly resolved.

Sets the type of content that this editor handles. This calls getEditorKitForContentType, and then setEditorKit if an editor kit can be successfully located. This is mostly convenience method that can be used as an alternative to calling setEditorKit directly.

If there is a charset definition specified as a parameter of the content type specification, it will be used when loading input streams using the associated EditorKit. For example if the type is specified as text/html; charset=EUC-JP the content will be loaded using the EditorKit registered for text/html and the Reader provided to the EditorKit to load unicode into the document will use the EUC-JP charset for translating to unicode. If the type is not recognized, the content will be loaded using the EditorKit registered for plain text, text/plain.

Sets the currently installed kit for handling content. This is the bound property that establishes the content type of the editor. Any old kit is first deinstalled, then if kit is non-null, the new kit is installed, and a default document created for it. A PropertyChange event ("editorKit") is always fired when setEditorKit is called.

NOTE: This has the side effect of changing the model, because the EditorKit is the source of how a particular type of content is modeled. This method will cause setDocument to be called on behalf of the caller to ensure integrity of the internal state.

Fetches the editor kit to use for the given type of content. This is called when a type is requested that doesn't match the currently installed type. If the component doesn't have an EditorKit registered for the given type, it will try to create an EditorKit from the default EditorKit registry. If that fails, a PlainEditorKit is used on the assumption that all text documents can be represented as plain text.

This method can be reimplemented to use some other kind of type registry. This can be reimplemented to use the Java Activation Framework, for example.

Creates a handler for the given type from the default registry of editor kits. The registry is created if necessary. If the registered class has not yet been loaded, an attempt is made to dynamically load the prototype of the kit for the given type. If the type was registered with a ClassLoader, that ClassLoader will be used to load the prototype. If there was no registered ClassLoader, Class.forName will be used to load the prototype.

Once a prototype EditorKit instance is successfully located, it is cloned and the clone is returned.

Sets the text of this TextComponent to the specified content, which is expected to be in the format of the content type of this editor. For example, if the type is set to text/html the string should be specified in terms of HTML.

This is implemented to remove the contents of the current document, and replace them by parsing the given string using the current EditorKit. This gives the semantics of the superclass by not changing out the model, while supporting the content type currently set on this component. The assumption is that the previous content is relatively small, and that the previous content doesn't have side effects. Both of those assumptions can be violated and cause undesirable results. To avoid this, create a new document, getEditorKit().createDefaultDocument(), and replace the existing Document with the new one. You are then assured the previous Document won't have any lingering state.

1. Leaving the existing model in place means that the old view will be torn down, and a new view created, where replacing the document would avoid the tear down of the old view.
2. Some formats (such as HTML) can install things into the document that can influence future contents. HTML can have style information embedded that would influence the next content installed unexpectedly.

An alternative way to load this component with a string would be to create a StringReader and call the read method. In this case the model would be replaced after it was initialized with the contents of the string.