Core Java

Using Java 8 to Prevent Excessively Wide Logs

Some logs are there to be consumed by machines and kept forever.

Other logs are there just to debug and to be consumed by humans. In the latter case, you often want to make sure that you don’t produce too much logs, especially not too wide logs, as many editors and other tools have problems once line lenghts exceed a certain size (e.g. this Eclipse bug).

String manipulation used to be a major pain in Java, with lots of tedious-to-write loops and branches, etc. No longer with Java 8!

The following truncate method will truncate all lines within a string to a certain length:

public String truncate(String string) {
    return truncate(string, 80);
}

public String truncate(String string, int length) {
    return Seq.of(string.split("\n"))
              .map(s -> StringUtils.abbreviate(s, 400))
              .join("\n");
}

The above example uses jOOλ 0.9.4 and Apache Commons Lang, but you can achieve the same using vanilla Java 8, of course:

public String truncate(String string) {
    return truncate(string, 80);
}

public String truncate(String string, int length) {
    return Stream.of(string.split("\n"))
                 .map(s -> s.substring(0, Math.min(s.length(), length)))
                 .collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));
}

The above when truncating logs to length 10, the above program will produce:

Input

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis
nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu
fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Output

Lorem ipsum dolor...
incididunt ut lab...
nostrud exercitat...
Duis aute irure d...
fugiat nulla pari...
culpa qui officia...

Happy logging!

Lukas Eder

Lukas is a Java and SQL enthusiast developer. He created the Data Geekery GmbH. He is the creator of jOOQ, a comprehensive SQL library for Java, and he is blogging mostly about these three topics: Java, SQL and jOOQ.
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