Cusctom tag with body

Question

I have written a custom tag with body.
The intention is to process the body and
replace any periods with line breaks (in HTML)
before writing the BodyContent to the
enclosing JspWriter.
I find that replacing "." with ".<br>" does not
take any effect. The output HTML does not contain
the <br> tags (when viewed from the browser).
From the doAfterBody() I call the filter
to replace the periods with <br> as follows.
Pl let me know if my understanding of the
TAG lifecycle is wrong:
public int doAfterBody() throws JspException {
try {
String txt = getBodyContent().getString();
replaceDots(txt.toLowerCase()
getPreviousOut()
catch (java.io.IOException ioxc) {
throw new JspException(ioxc.toString());
return SKIP_BODY;
private void replaceDots(final String x, JspWriter w)
throws java.io.IOException
if (x == null) return ;
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(x, ".");
while (st.hasMoreTokens()) {
String f = (String)st.nextToken();
w.println( f.equals(".") ? ".<br>":f);

Answer 1

I think the problem might be in the use of StringTokenizer. Since the "." is not returned as a token, the code to add the "<BR>" is never executed. It looks as if your existing code should actually remove the periods.
Try:
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(x, ".", true);
while (st.hasMoreTokens()) {
  String f = (String)st.nextToken();
  w.println( f.equals(".") ? ".<br>":f);
} or
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(x, ".");
while (st.hasMoreTokens()) {
  String f = (String)st.nextToken();
  w.println( f + ".<br>");
}(The "& gt;" should be ">" - I wish they'd fix the formatting!)