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Asked: 2026-05-15T02:26:00+00:00

I’ve got a JSP Document (JSP in XML) nicely formatted and when the webpage

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I’ve got a “JSP Document” (“JSP in XML”) nicely formatted and when the webpage is generated and sent to the user, some linebreaks are removed.

Now the really weird part: apparently the “main” .jsp always gets all its linebreak removed but for any subsequent .jsp included from the main .jsp, linebreaks seems to be randomly removed (some are there, others aren’t).

For example, if I’m looking at the webpage served from Firefox and ask to “view source”, I get to see what is generated.

So, what determines when/how linebreaks are kept/removed?

This is just an example I made up… Can you force a .jsp to serve this:

<body><div id="page"><div id="header"><div class="title">...

or this:

<body>
  <div id="page">
    <div id="header">
      <div class="title">...

?

I take it that linebreaks are removed to save on bandwidth, but what if I want to keep them? And what if I want to keep the same XML indentation as in my .jsp file?

Is this doable?

EDIT

Following skaffman’s advice, I took a look at the generated .java files and the “main” one doesn’t have lots of out.write but not a single one writing tabs nor newlines. Contrary to that file, all the ones that I’m including from that main .jsp have lots of lines like:

out.write("\t...\n");

So I guess my question stays exactly the same: what determines how tabs/space/linebreaks are included/removed in the output?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As per the JSP specification:

    JSP.6.2.3 Semantic Model

    …

    To clearly explain the processing of whitespace, we follow the structure of the
    XSLT specification. The first step in processing a JSP document is to identify the
    nodes of the document. Then, all textual nodes that have only white space are
    dropped from the document; the only exception are nodes in a jsp:text element,
    which are kept verbatim.     The resulting nodes are interpreted as described in the
    following sections. Template data is either passed directly to the response or it is
    mediated through (standard or custom) actions.

    So, if you want to preserve whitespace, you need to wrap the desired parts in <jsp:text>.

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