How to Get Backspace \B to Work in Eclipse's Console

How to get backspace \b to work in Eclipse's console?

Eclipse Bug #76936. I wouldn't count on them to fix it, and there are no workarounds listed.

You might have luck finding a plugin that contributes a more advanced console.

How to Achieve -r,-b,-f in eclipse

The Eclipse console does not support any of \b, \f, or \r properly. \r is treated as a new line, the others as spaces.

This is described in Eclipse bug 76936 which has been open since 2004 and despite some attempts to fix is still open.

Java backspace escape

Java doesn't 'handle' that character at all. All it knows about is a byte stream onto which the OS says it can write bytes, and it will happily write bytes into it, including an ASCII backspace.

What happens when the stream receives that character has nothing whatsoever to do with Java, it is totally terminal-dependent. Some terminals will erase the previous character, some will display the backspace character as some weird glyph, or even as a special "backspace character" glyph. Some may drop the character altogether if they can't interpret it, others (most terminal emulators, in fact) will behave differently depending on how they're configured. But all this has nothing to do with Java, they will behave that way whether they're written to by Java or Perl print or C++ cout or whatever else.

\b in Java - Windows implemented

I don't know about Eclipse's failures (god knows I've pulled enough hair out trying to fix issues my coworker gets using Eclipse), but could you manage with using the [home] character?

System.out.print("Hello!" + (char)13);
System.out.print("      ");
System.out.print("Hello");

It's a kludge compared to \b for your purpose, but if the output you're using doesn't work with one control character, try another! :)

Backspace \b Chacacter Scope with regard to OS?

Can I write the backspace char to file to delete previously written test?

No.

Can I delete a newline ("\r\n" or either) character with \b.

No.

The only situations where characters like \b will be interpreted like this are when you are writing to a screen, console or terminal.

Characters written to a file are not treated like this.

This is not a Java-specific restriction. Rather it is inherent in the way that operating systems¹ handle writing data to files.

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^{1 - That is ... every OS that I have encountered.}

C++: Cannot delete characters already printed to console before outputting

The problem has something to do with MacOS. I tried backspacing fixed input and nothing was deleted even when I just output '\b'. I ran my program in Visual Studio and it outputs as expected, so I have concluded that either Eclipse on MacOS or MacOS itself does not support '\b'.

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