Blank lines in JSP output

I had posted some small entries on my old blog at Sun, and wanted to transfer some of those here for reference sake.


I was having an issue with jsp outputting blank lines at the top of output - and if the contentType being text/xml - causing parsing error being that the <?xml... directive not being the first line - causing the exception:

'XML or text declaration not at start of entity'

Come to find out, this had been addressed in JSP2.1 - but was a bit hard to track down.

Adding the line:

<%@page trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true"%>

to the top of your jsp will remove these, thus letting the XML feeds parse correctly.

Small fix - but has cured some headache in creating some feed proxies.