Annotation (Java 2 Platform SE 5.0) (original) (raw)

java.text

Class Annotation

java.lang.Object extended by java.text.Annotation

public class Annotation

An Annotation object is used as a wrapper for a text attribute value if the attribute has annotation characteristics. These characteristics are:

The text range that the attribute is applied to is critical to the semantics of the range. That means, the attribute cannot be applied to subranges of the text range that it applies to, and, if two adjacent text ranges have the same value for this attribute, the attribute still cannot be applied to the combined range as a whole with this value.
The attribute or its value usually do no longer apply if the underlying text is changed. An example is grammatical information attached to a sentence: For the previous sentence, you can say that "an example" is the subject, but you cannot say the same about "an", "example", or "exam". When the text is changed, the grammatical information typically becomes invalid. Another example is Japanese reading information (yomi).

Wrapping the attribute value into an Annotation object guarantees that adjacent text runs don't get merged even if the attribute values are equal, and indicates to text containers that the attribute should be discarded if the underlying text is modified.

Since:

1.2

See Also:

AttributedCharacterIterator

Constructor Summary
Annotation(Object value) Constructs an annotation record with the given value, which may be null.

Method Summary
Object	getValue() Returns the value of the attribute, which may be null.
String	toString() Returns the String representation of this Annotation.

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object
clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, wait, wait, [wait](../../java/lang/Object.html#wait%28long, int%29)

Constructor Detail

Annotation

public Annotation(Object value)

Constructs an annotation record with the given value, which may be null.

Parameters:

value - The value of the attribute

Method Detail

getValue

public Object getValue()

Returns the value of the attribute, which may be null.

toString

public String toString()

Returns the String representation of this Annotation.

Overrides:

[toString](../../java/lang/Object.html#toString%28%29) in class [Object](../../java/lang/Object.html "class in java.lang")

Returns:

a string representation of the object.

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For further API reference and developer documentation, see Java 2 SDK SE Developer Documentation. That documentation contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions, with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.