What System.out.println() print out when it has no data?

[bingowinner]

Hi, so this seems like a very dumbr question...

What does System.out.println(); print out when no data is passed to it? Is it just regular whitespace? It's not a linebreak or space character?

I ask because I've got an exam in a few days, and I'm just going over a past paper. Some of the questions say, "If you think nothing is printed out, then write no output.", however, System.out.println(); is placed in such a way that even if, say an loop through an array didn't print anything [meaningful] out, there will always be a System.out.println(); outside of the array to print, but no data is passed to it - kinda to catch people out?

I tested this in Eclipse and within the command line area, there is whitespace printed out. Do you believe this would be considered something printed out?

[alykins]

System.out.println("begin...");
for(int i =0; i <=2; i++)
{
  System.out.println("cat");
  System.out.println("nip");
  System.out.println();
}
System.out.println("end...");

output

begin...
cat
nip

cat
nip

cat
nip

end...

if you are in a class, and having an exam, then that means you should have been trying code, practicing, etc- all that aside- it means you should have an IDE (eclipse, netbeans, etc)

in short- you could have (and still can for extra practice/combinations) coded this real quick and seen the answer

you need to expose yourself to as many code situations as possible.

edit:
the code block for output puts in some extra line breaks after "end..." it would not do extras, just one

[alykins]

Originally Posted by bingowinner

I tested this in Eclipse and within the command line area, there is whitespace printed out. Do you believe this would be considered something printed out?

sorry, just saw that line oops-
I would write that it writes a line break to the console (or a new line feed)... or to be more technical saw there is a line feed or you could even be slightly 'cocky' and say that it prints the escape \n (note not "\n" bc that would be System.out.println("\\n")

[Fou-Lu]

println is equivalent to using System.out.print(whateverdata + '\n') or System.out.print(whateverdata + "\n"). Java considers \n as a valid linefeed either inline with double quotes similar to C printf, or with single quotes denoting it as a char and not a string. When provided with no data, or data that is empty, it will print only a linefeed.
So:

System.out.println();
System.out.print('\n');
System.out.print("\n");

Would print three empty lines.