Whitespace generated by JSTL tags

[Corby Jacobs]

I am investigating an issue with a JSP page which, under certain circumstances, 
generates a 22.4 MB file to send back to the client.  Turns out, a substantial portion 
of this page is whitespace.  As I see it, the whitespace is coming from two places:

1) whitespace the developer added to make the JSP more readable seems to be repeated 
in the HTML sent to the client (and duplicated if it's inside a <c:forEach> tag)

and 

2) the tags themselves are generating extra newline characters

To address issue 1, I edited the JSP file, changed all tabs to one blank space, and 
removed all empty lines.  This reduced the size of the file from 22.4MB to 4.1MB.  
Then, within the triple-nested <c:forEach> loops, I made the code all one line -- very 
ugly, but reduced the size of the HTML file to 367kB.

To confirm my suspicions on issue 2, I re-wrote a small excerpt of the page to use 
scriptlets instead of <c:forEach> and <c:if> tags.  The loop is used to generate a 
<select> with <option>s whose value depend on the iteration through the loop.  As you 
can see in the excerpt from the "view page" source sent to the client, the version 
generated with the core JSTL tags has extra whitespace between the <option>s.  Imagine 
doing this for a menu of 100 <option>s, 3 times, and you can see where all the 
whitespace is coming from.  I tested this with both Tomcat and Weblogic as the web 
server.  

My question is this:  Is there any way to avoid all this whitespace caused by core 
JSTL tags?



<table>
    <tr>
    <td align="left" bgcolor="#ffffff"> 
    This selection menu was generated using standard JSTL tags &lt;c:if&gt;, 
&lt;c:forEach&gt;, and &lt;c:out&gt;.
    </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td align="left" bgcolor="#ffffff"> 
<select name="termselector">

   
      
         <option value="wordNode_1" testID="option_wordNode_1" >
         HELP
         </option>
      
   
      
         <option value="wordNode_2" testID="option_wordNode_2" >
         USER
         </option>
      
   
      
         <option value="wordNode_3" testID="option_wordNode_3" >
         WRITE
         </option>
      
   
      
         <option value="wordNode_4" testID="option_wordNode_4" >
         QUERY
         </option>
      
   
</select>
    </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td align="left" bgcolor="#ffffff"> 
    This selection menu was generated using scriptlets instead of standard JSTL tags.
    </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
    <td align="left" bgcolor="#ffffff"> 
<select name="termselector">
 
         <option value=wordNode_1  testID=option_wordNode_1 >
         HELP
         </option>

         <option value=wordNode_2  testID=option_wordNode_2 >
         USER
         </option>

         <option value=wordNode_3  testID=option_wordNode_3 >
         WRITE
         </option>

         <option value=wordNode_4  testID=option_wordNode_4 >
         QUERY
         </option>

</select>
    </tr>
    </td>
</table>


Thanks,

Corby Jacobs
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Convera Corporation
11000 Broken Land Pkwy
Columbia, MD 21044

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