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?
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>
.
Not a very precise answer but according to this message, Jasper might be doing this (I admit I didn't check myself):
I had a search around, and don't think
this one has been asked before.
I've been writing my JSP pages as XML
documents (.jspx suffix), and one
difference that annoys me a little
between using the terse XML document
syntax and the (pre-2.0) legacy syntax
are line breaks, or lack of in the
former.
The processed XML document results in
the XHTML where the tags are unbroken
by either spacing or line breaks.
I understand fully the concept behind
why this is the case; the first XML
document is parsed down to it's node
tree, and then the XHTML is generated
based on this tree.
However, I am of the understanding
that the white spacing doesn't have to
be lost along the way. I checked the
jasper code, particularly
org.apache.jasper.compiler.Node, and a
cursory inspection reveals a lot of
.trim() calls, that may be
unnecessarily removing the spacing.
However, I am not so familiar with
this code to say decisively.
In summation, this may be a bug/area
of improvement. Regardless, is there a
way to embed line breaks via
configuration? I feel confident to be
able to achieve these with ugly, ugly
CDATA sections, or some like technique
(jsp:text?)... but before I go to that
trouble, is there an easier/neater
way?
The message is pretty old but the same behavior is also reported in this comment and your question seems to imply it still applies.
Not sure you can change this behavior (without using a Filter).
<trim-directive-whitespaces>true</trim-directive-whitespaces>
Whitespace inside <jsp:text>
is stripped if you use the above directive in your web.xml
. Given the semantic model quoted in BalusC's answer, this directive is only useful if you're not using XML syntax.
(Tomcat 6.0.16; Servlet 2.5 declarations; JSP 2.1 declarations in XML syntax)