Question

In PHP, I commonly would do something like this:

foreach(array('street','town','county','postcode') as $e) {
    echo $address[$e] . '<br/>';
}

It’s concise and easy to work with. Is there any way of doing this in EL? I’m having trouble finding a good way to do it cleanly.

Answer 1

There’s nothing like that in standard JSTL/EL, but you could use JSTL fn:split() to split a single delimited string to an array:

<c:forEach items="${fn:split('street,town,county,postcode', ',')}" var="e">
    ${address[e]}<br/>
</c:forEach>

(provided that ${address} points to a Map with the given values as keys or a Javabean with the given properties)

Or if the ${address} is indeed a Map which contains only those keys already, you could also just loop over the Map itself:

<c:forEach items="${address}" var="entry">
    ${entry.value}<br/>
</c:forEach>

(the map key can in the above example be printed by ${entry.key}; also note that you need LinkedHashMap in order to maintain insertion order)