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How to: View Multiple Lines in the Windows Forms TextBox Control

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By default, the Windows Forms TextBox control displays a single line of text and does not display scroll bars. If the text is longer than the available space, only part of the text is visible. You can change this default behavior by setting the Multiline, WordWrap, and ScrollBars properties to appropriate values.

To display a carriage return in the TextBox control

  • To display a carriage return in a multi-line TextBox, use the NewLine property.

    Be aware that the interpretation of escape characters (\) is language-specific. Visual Basic uses Chr$(13) & Chr$(10) for the carriage return and linefeed character combination.

To view multiple lines in the TextBox control

  1. Set the Multiline property to true. If WordWrap is true (the default), then the text in the control will appear as one or more paragraphs; otherwise it will appear as a list, in which some lines may be clipped at the edge of the control.

  2. Set the ScrollBars property to an appropriate value.

    Value Description
    None Use this value if the text will be a paragraph that almost always fits the control. The user can use the mouse pointer to move around inside the control if the text is too long to display all at once.
    Horizontal Use this value if you want to display a list of lines, some of which may be longer than the width of the TextBox control.
    Both Use this value if the list may be longer than the height of the control.

  3. Set the WordWrap property to an appropriate value.

    Value Description
    false Text in the control will not automatically be wrapped, so it will scroll to the right until a line break is reached. Use this value if you chose Horizontal scroll bars or Both, above.
    true (default) The horizontal scrollbar will not appear. Use this value if you chose Vertical scroll bars or None, above, to display one or more paragraphs.

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