Annotation

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• The Annotation class is a wrapper for text attribute values with annotation characteristics, ensuring the attribute's critical tie to its text range.

• Annotation objects prevent accidental merging of adjacent text runs with the same attribute value, even when text is modified.

• The class provides methods to construct an Annotation with a specified value, retrieve the attribute's value, and obtain a string representation of the Annotation.

public class Annotation extends Object

An Annotation object is used as a wrapper for a text attribute value if the attribute has annotation characteristics. These characteristics are:

• The text range that the attribute is applied to is critical to the semantics of the range. That means, the attribute cannot be applied to subranges of the text range that it applies to, and, if two adjacent text ranges have the same value for this attribute, the attribute still cannot be applied to the combined range as a whole with this value.
• The attribute or its value usually do no longer apply if the underlying text is changed.

An example is grammatical information attached to a sentence: For the previous sentence, you can say that "an example" is the subject, but you cannot say the same about "an", "example", or "exam". When the text is changed, the grammatical information typically becomes invalid. Another example is Japanese reading information (yomi).

Wrapping the attribute value into an Annotation object guarantees that adjacent text runs don't get merged even if the attribute values are equal, and indicates to text containers that the attribute should be discarded if the underlying text is modified.

See Also

• AttributedCharacterIterator

Public Constructor Summary

Annotation(Object value) Constructs an annotation record with the given value, which may be null.

Public Method Summary

Object	getValue() Returns the value of the attribute, which may be null.
String	toString() Returns the String representation of this Annotation.

Inherited Method Summary

From class java.lang.Object

Object	clone() Creates and returns a copy of this Object.
boolean	equals(Object obj) Compares this instance with the specified object and indicates if they are equal.
void	finalize() Invoked when the garbage collector has detected that this instance is no longer reachable.
final Class<?>	getClass() Returns the unique instance of Class that represents this object's class.
int	hashCode() Returns an integer hash code for this object.
final void	notify() Causes a thread which is waiting on this object's monitor (by means of calling one of the wait() methods) to be woken up.
final void	notifyAll() Causes all threads which are waiting on this object's monitor (by means of calling one of the wait() methods) to be woken up.
String	toString() Returns a string containing a concise, human-readable description of this object.
final void	wait(long timeout, int nanos) Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object or until the specified timeout expires.
final void	wait(long timeout) Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object or until the specified timeout expires.
final void	wait() Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object.

Public Constructors

public Annotation (Object value)

Constructs an annotation record with the given value, which may be null.

Parameters

value	the value of the attribute

Public Methods

public Object getValue ()

Returns the value of the attribute, which may be null.

Returns

• the value of the attribute

public String toString ()

Returns the String representation of this Annotation.

Returns

• the String representation of this Annotation