Question

I’m designing JSP application and I want to print user input. I’m in need of something like <c:out> tag but then one that allows user to do some formatting.

To start, I want to translate \n to <br /> but I still need all the XML escaping <c:out> provides. Then I realized that it would be nice to allow more formating, like BBcode or Wiki syntax.

Is there any JSP tag library, which allows that?

Answer 1

why not create your own tags, with the use of xml

http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/JSP/Createyourowntagacustomtagbody.htm

XML file:

<tag>
    <description>
        Escapes a String to HTML, either writing it to the response
        or exporting it to a scoped variable. 
        The string may be the value attribute or the tag body.
    </description>
    <name>escapeHTML</name>
    <tag-class>nl.strohalm.cyclos.taglibs.EscapeHTMLTag</tag-class>
    <body-content>JSP</body-content>

    <attribute>
        <description>
            The string value to be escaped. If not set, the tag body will be used instead.
        </description>
        <name>value</name>
        <required>false</required>
        <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
        <type>java.lang.Object</type>
    </attribute>
    <attribute>
        <description>If set to true, will only replace line breaks for br tags, ignoring other processing. Defaults to false</description>
        <name>brOnly</name>
        <required>false</required>
        <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
        <type>boolean</type>
    </attribute>
    <attribute>
        <description>
            A context variable name. If provided, instead of writing the escaped value to the response
            output, it will be set on the scope determined by the scope attribute, under this variable name
        </description>
        <name>var</name>
        <required>false</required>
        <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
        <type>java.lang.String</type>
    </attribute>
    <attribute>
        <description>
            The scope name for the variable to be exported. 
            May be one of: page, request, session or application.
            Defaults to page.
        </description>
        <name>scope</name>
        <required>false</required>
        <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
        <type>java.lang.String</type>
    </attribute>
</tag>

And then you write a little java code of what you want to achive !

e.g. corresponding to tag above simple java code example:

 public static String escape(final String string, boolean brOnly) {
    String out = string;
    if (!brOnly) {
        out = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(out);
    }
    out = StringUtils.replace(out, "\n", "<br />");
    out = StringUtils.replace(out, "\\n", "<br />");
    return out;
}