Question

In a JSP file I wanto to replace newlines (\n) with <br />. I tried

${fn:replace(someString, '\n', '<br />')}

But I get an error '\n' ecnountered, was expeting one of...

Which I guess it means the parser doesn’t like something like this.

Is it possible to do something like this using EL?

Answer 1

Create an EL function for that.

First create a static method which does the desired job:

package com.example;

public final class Functions {
     private Functions() {}

     public static String nl2br(String string) {
         return (string != null) ? string.replace("\n", "<br/>") : null;
     }
}

Then create a /WEB-INF/functions.tld which look like follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<taglib 
    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-jsptaglibrary_2_1.xsd"
    version="2.1">

    <tlib-version>1.0</tlib-version>
    <short-name>Custom_Functions</short-name>
    <uri>http://example.com/functions</uri>

    <function>
        <name>nl2br</name>
        <function-class>com.example.Functions</function-class>
        <function-signature>java.lang.String nl2br(java.lang.String)</function-signature>
    </function>
</taglib>

Finally use it as follows:

<%@taglib uri="http://example.com/functions" prefix="f" %>
...
${f:nl2br(someString)}

See also:

• Our EL wiki page