Java – How do I add line breaks to hint text in JavaFX?

I

have a TextArea with some hint text and I want to break it into several lines, but, for some reason, line breaks don’t work in the hint text.

Code:

TextArea paragraph = new TextArea();
paragraph.setWrapText(true);
paragraph.setPromptText(
    "Stuff done today:\n"
    + "\n"
    + "- Went to the grocery store\n"
    + "- Ate some cookies\n"
    + "- Watched a tv show"
);

Result:

As you can see, the text does not wrap correctly. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Hints are displayed internally by a node of type text that can handle line breaks. So the interesting question is why don’t they show? You can reveal why by looking at the promptText property: it is silently replacing all \n with an empty string:

private StringProperty promptText = new SimpleStringProperty(this, "promptText", "") {
    @Override protected void invalidated() {
         Strip out newlines
        String txt = get();
        if (txt != null && txt.contains("\n")) {
            txt = txt.replace("\n", "");
            set(txt);
        }
    }
};

One workaround (not sure if it works on all platforms – I won) is to use \r instead of:

paragraph.setPromptText(
    "Stuff done today:\r"
    + "\r"
    + "- Went to the grocery store\r"
    + "- Ate some cookies\r"
    + "- Watched a tv show"
);