Clearing the console screen?

[Jonny Tight Lips]

Just wondering if it is pssoble to clear the console screen kind like cls in turing. Any help would be great. Thx

[wtd]

No, it's not.

Turing doesn't have a console screen.

You don't want to clear the screen anyway. The user knows what he or she typed. Wiping it out only serves to make the program more difficult to use.

If you want something like a piece of text centered on the screen, with whitespace all around, in Java you can either use Swing or SWT.

[1of42]

wtd is incorrect - on Windows:

c++:

system ("cls");

will clear the console screen.

using system calls is bad practice, and will make your program non-portable, but it IS possible to do.

[wtd]

The language in question is Java. The quickets way to do this in Java would be:

code:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cls");

[[Gandalf]]

Would that be portable, or not?

[wtd]

[Gandalf] wrote:

Would that be portable, or not?

It would not.

It would require that the underlying system understand "cls".

[1of42]

Well, so wtd, I'm still right - it's not my fault that I thought this was C++ (i'm tired)! I swear!

[wtd]

Yes, unfortunately you're right.

[Hikaru79]

Of course, if you're REALLY desperate to do this, and want it to be relatively portable, there's always something like this:

Java:

import java.io.*; public class Test{                 public static void main (String [] args){                 System.out.println("Hello, world!");                 try {                         if (System.getProperty("os.name").indexOf("Windows")!=-1){                                 Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cls");                         } else if (System.getProperty("os.name").indexOf("x")!=-1){                                 String clear_str;                                 Process clear_proc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/bin/clear");                                 BufferedReader clear_in = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(clear_proc.getInputStream()));                                 while ((clear_str = clear_in.readLine()) != null) {                                         System.out.println(clear_str);                                 }                         }                 } catch (IOException f){ System.out.println(System.getProperty("os.name")); }         } }

This is far from perfect, but it might be enough for some purposes.

[wtd]

code:

/usr/bin/clear

Should possibly be:

code:

/usr/bin/env clear