There is a problem with using JSTL to show text data that was previously saved from a textarea. If you show such text data in a table, the line-breaks from the textarea will be ignored and the text will be hard to read. A possible solution is to use a Java bean to process such data and replace line-breaks with BR tags before showing it on the page. Such a bean may look as follows:
package beans;
public class HTMLBreaker {
private String text;
public HTMLBreaker() {
}
private String insertBreaks(String text){
int len = text.length();
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(len+16);
for(int i=0; i<text.length();i++){
if(text.charAt(i)==’\n’)
sb.append("<br>");
else
sb.append(text.charAt(i));
}
return sb.toString();
}
public String getText() {
return text;
}
public void setText(String string) {
text="";
if(string != null)
text = insertBreaks(string);
}
}
Then, on a JSP page create the bean instance:
<jsp:useBean id=’hbreaker’ class=’beans.HTMLBreaker’>
Set the bean property with the value of a database field:
<c:set target=’${hbreaker}’ property=’text’ value=’${row.text}’/>
Display the modified value of the bean property on the page:
<jsp:getProperty name=’hbreaker’ property=’text’/>
If you use the JSTL c:out tag:
<c:out value=’${hbreaker.text}’/>
the BR tags surrounding symbols will be replaced with HTML characters, and show up as such on the screen.
Don’t forget to close the bean tag:
</jsp:useBean>
A couple of other solutions using the JSTL fn:replace function and the Jakarta String Tag Library are offered at this weblog.
