string - How can I replace newline characters using JSP and JSTL?

Question

I have a list of bean objects passed into my JSP page, and one of them is a comment field. This field may contain newlines, and I want to replace them with semicolons using JSTL, so that the field can be displayed in a text input. I have found one solution, but it's not very elegant. I'll post below as a possibility.

Answer 1

Here is a solution I found. It doesn't seem very elegant, though:

<%@ taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>
<% pageContext.setAttribute("newLineChar", "
"); %>

${fn:replace(item.comments, newLineChar, "; ")}