Or perhaps you want to write an applet that displays several lines of text. While it would be possible to cram all this information into one long string, that's not too friendly to authors who want to use your applet on their pages. It's much more sensible to give each line its own <PARAM> tag. If this is the case, you should name the tags via some predictable and numeric scheme. For instance in the text example the following set of <PARAM> tags would be sensible:
<PARAM name="Line1" value="There once was a man from Japan">
<PARAM name="Line2" value="Whose poetry never would scan">
<PARAM name="Line3" value="When asked reasons why,">
<PARAM name="Line4" value="He replied, with a sigh:">
<PARAM name="Line5" value="I always try to get as many
syllables into the last line as I can.">
The program below displays this limerick. Lines are accumulated into an array of strings called poem
. A for
loop fills the array with the different lines of poetry. There are 101 spaces in the array, but since you won't normally need that many, an if
clause tests to see whether the attempt to get a parameter was successful by checking to see if the line is null
. As soon as one fails, the loop is broken. Once the loop is finished num_lines
is decremented by one
because the last line the loop tried to read wasn't there.
The paint()
method loops through the poem array and prints each String on the screen, incrementing the y
position by fifteen pixels each step so you don't draw one line on top of the other.