Question

Before I write a custom tag to do this, I want to be sure I didn’t miss something in EL or JSTL.

There’s an int returned by a bean property that is stored in the request scope. I need to output it as hex. But after searching, it seems there is no way in JSP to output an int that is returned from a bean by EL thusly…

${someBean.someInt}

…as a hexadecimal value, in the way that…

<%= String.format("0x%X", someBean.getSomeInt()) %>

…would.

Am I correct? If not, how is it done? (Our departmental coding standards disallow Java directly included in JSP using the <% %> syntax. We have to write tags if we can’t find something already available.)

Answer 1

You can’t do this in EL or using JSTL’s formatting tags. Writing a custom tag or EL function is the best option.

If it’s just one int you have to format you could add a String getter to your bean to do the formatting

public String getSomeIntAsHex(){
  return String.format("0x%X", someInt);
}

and then you could use that getter in EL

${someBean.someIntAsHex}