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javahtmlswingjtree

How do I display HTML as plain text in a JTree?

Problem: The content of the leaf nodes of my tree is HTML, but I don't want them rendered as HTML.

Many Swing components can include snippets of HTML in order to change how they are rendered. This includes the nodes of a JTree:

DefaultMutableTreeNode myLeafNode = new DefaultMutableTreeNode("<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>");

If this node is added to the DefaultTreeModel, and the model to the JTree, it will render the content as HTML.

How do I prevent this? How do I force it to be rendered as plain text?

Edit: @David Wallace's answer (see below) works. Here's how it looks:

enter image description here

Solution

  • Use the StringEscapeUtils class from the Apache Commons library, to escape your HTML, then put it inside <html><body> to tell Swing to display the result as HTML. 

    import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils;

String escapedHtml = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4(htmlToDisplay); 
DefaultMutableTreeNode myLeafNode = 
    new DefaultMutableTreeNode("<html><body>" + escapedHtml + "</body></html>");