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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T15:10:16+00:00

I’m new to JSP and JSTL, so I’m probably doing something really dumb here.

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I’m new to JSP and JSTL, so I’m probably doing something really dumb here.

I have javax.servlet.jsp.jstl-api-1.2.1 and javax.servlet.jsp.jstl-1.2.1 in my webapps’s lib directory. I’m running on Tomcat7. If it makes any difference, tomcat is being launched by Eclipse. My project is a “Dynamic Web Project”.

web.xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app 
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
    version="3.0">
        <display-name>example</display-name>
        <welcome-file-list>
                <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
        </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

index.jsp looks like this

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <%
        String s = "Foo";
    %>
    <c:out value="${s}" />
    <c:out value="Bar" />
</body>
</html>

I expect this to display a page with Foo Bar on it. Instead, it displays just Bar. This happens with all my EL expressions. All my EL expressions seem to be coming up empty.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve seen your self-answer but that’s not the right way:

    If you’re already using JSTL with c:outs anyway avoid using scriptlets altogether and replace

    <%
    request.setAttribute("s", "Foo");
%>

    with this: 

    <c:set var="s" value="Foo" scope="request"/>

    then printing the value would be:

    <c:out value="${requestScope.s}"/>

    or simply ${requestScope.s} since the c:out tag isn’t really necessary unless you need to scape XML characters.

    (${s} is also fine since the cointainer searches in all the scopes until it finds the first occurrence but, explicitly writting it is cleaner imo)

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