Not able to display special characters properly in a JSP page

Question

I need to display following special characters in a table TD (exclude the back slash in between < symbol and forward slash),

1) \'/<\\/@/tes

Answer 1

Everthing which get sent by JSP is by default treated as HTML by the webbrowser. The < indicates start of a HTML tag and thus the webbrowser will parse it as such (and eventually fail due to a syntax error).

You want to escape those HTML special characters like <, >, & and ".

&lt; will be displayed as <
&gt; will be displayed as >
&amp; will be displayed as &
&quot; will be displayed as "

If it is dynamic text, this is best to be done with JSTL <c:out> tag.

<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
...
<c:out value="${bean.text}" />

Of if you want to set a HTML attribute, the JSTL fn:escapeXml() function is nicer.

<%@taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>
...
<input type="text" value="${fn:escapeXml(bean.text)}" />

Answer 2

I got it to work on JSP by adding this directive to the page

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>