Text Blocks

A text block is a multi-line string literal — opened and closed with triple double-quotes — that lets you write JSON, SQL, and HTML naturally, without escaping every newline or gluing lines together with + .

Learn Text Blocks in our free Java course — a beginner-friendly interactive lesson with worked examples, a practice exercise and a quick reference.

Part of the free Java course at LearnCodingFast — hands-on lessons with examples you run in your browser, plus practice exercises and a quick quiz.

You should know how ordinary Strings and escape sequences like \n work, and ideally have seen var . Text blocks need Java 15 or newer .

💡 Analogy: Writing a multi-line string the old way is like reading a poem aloud and saying "new line" after every single verse — exhausting and easy to get wrong ( "a\n" + "b\n" + ... ). A text block is like handing someone the printed page: the line breaks are already there . You write the text once, exactly as it should look, between two """ fences.

And because the compiler strips the indentation you used to line the block up with your code, the block looks neatly indented in your source but produces a clean, un-indented string.

Open with """ followed by a newline (nothing else may sit on that line), write your content, then close with """ . Everything between is the string. The example below produces exactly the same String as the old concatenation-with- \n approach — proven with .equals .

The clever part: the compiler scans every content line and the closing """ , finds the smallest shared leading indentation, and strips exactly that much from each line. That common, removable part is incidental whitespace; what remains is essential . This is how a block indented to match your code still yields an un-indented string.

In the second example below, moving the closing """ to the far left lowers the shared minimum, so four leading spaces survive on each line.

Two escapes are unique to text blocks. A backslash at the end of a line removes that line's newline, so a long sentence can be wrapped across several source lines yet stay one line in the string. The \s escape is a single space that also blocks the compiler from trimming trailing spaces — useful when trailing spaces actually matter.

Java has no ${" name "} -style interpolation. To drop values into a block, write %s / %d placeholders and call .formatted(args...) on it — a tidy instance shortcut for String.format . This makes text blocks ideal for JSON payloads and SQL queries built from variables.

Predict the result before opening each answer.

Answer: No. Content may not start on the opening line — the """ must be followed by a line terminator. Put hi on the next line.

Answer: 2 — just ab . The four leading spaces are incidental (the closing """ sits at column 4 too) and there's no trailing newline because """ follows ab directly.

Answer: a is "done\n" (closing """ on its own line adds a trailing newline); b is "done" with no newline. Delimiter placement controls the trailing newline.

🎯 Your Turn — A formatted report

Produce the exact multi-line report using a single text block and .formatted(...) .

🧩 Mini-Challenge — Build an HTML list

Loop items into list rows, then wrap them in a <ul> using a text block.

You can now write multi-line strings cleanly with text blocks, you understand how incidental whitespace is stripped, you know the \ and \s escapes, and you can turn a block into a template with .formatted() .

Next up: Switch Expressions — a modern, fall-through-free switch that produces a value.

Practice quiz

• Browse all free courses
• Cheat sheets & quizzes
• Coding dictionary