XML escaping

Did you ever want to define a constant in your code containing an XML string? For instance in a unit test to test if you can transform a piece of XML via XSLT into some desired format? You can do this the hard or the easy way: Either you take the chunk of XML, copy it in your IDE or some text editor and replace all double quotes with \" to escape them. Then you can start adding carriage returns in the String to have a somewhat readable piece of text. In case your XML contains all streets in Belgium, you will feel very, very useful doing this.

Or, you can have your IDE doing the work for you. In eclipse simply go to 'Window>Preference>Java>Editor>Typing' and check the “Escape text when pasting into a string literal“ option. As you can see it also adds the newlines and carriage returns:




I remember thinking 'Damn, I wish I knew about this before' when I first discovered this option. That might just be the criterium for any useful IDE feature I guess.