Question

I’ve found strange behavior with the format tag library. I’m formatting a copyright message in the footer of a webpage. I’m using the following pseudo code:

<fmt:message var="copyright" key="someKey">
    <fmt:param value="${year}"/>
</fmt:message>

...

<c:out value="${copyright}"/>

I’m just passing the year as an argument into the resource bundle. If you c-out the year value before passing it in:

<c:out value="${year}"/>
<%-- renders as 2012 --%>

But after the argument gets passed in, the year gets formatted as a number. The number is rendered as 2,012.

I’ve googled and asked around and haven’t found anything besides the generic Oracle documentation (http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/5/jstl/1.1/docs/tlddocs/fmt/tld-summary.html)

Has anyone else reached this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It’s been interpreted as a Number by MessageFormat and hence being formatted with a thousands separator which can be a comma or a dot, depending on the current locale. You can prevent it being interpreted as a Number by adding a zero width space:

<fmt:param value="${year}&#8203;"/>