Display characters with a delay in between each

Question

I am working on a simple text based adventure game.

I would like to get the text to show up one character at a time.

I'm not really sure what that is called, but I would like for the text to show up as if you are seeing the words being typed out.

Can this be done without using Swing?

Answer 1

You can write yourself a helper method that prints one character from the string, then waits for some time, then prints the next character, etc.

public void delayedPrint(int delay, String s) {
    try {
        for (char c : s.toCharArray()) {
            System.out.print(c);  // print characters without newline
            Thread.sleep(delay);  // wait for some milli seconds
        }
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
    }
    System.out.println(); // finally, add a line break
}

Then just use this method whenever you want to print some text in this way:

delayedPrint(100, "A long time ago, in a dungeon far far away...");