JSTL remove white space between date

Question

i used to print time but i found white spaces between date hours and minutes, i used to format the time as follows:

<fmt:formatDate var="formtMins" pattern="m" type="TIME" timeStyle="default" value="${exam.to}" />
<fmt:formatDate var="formHours" pattern="h" type="TIME" timeStyle="default" value="${exam.to}" />

Given that: exam.to is a date object, i used to put additional zeros if the minutes is zero or the hours is less than 10 as follows:

 <c:if test="${formtMins==0}">0</c:if>
    ${formtMins}:
    ${formHours}
<c:if test="${formHours<10}">0</c:if>

the previous code prints the time as follows:

12 : 0 0
0 4 :46
0 2 : 0 0

the spaces appears when i added the additional zeros and its not preferred, so i tried to remove any white space as follows but unfortunately it doesn't work:

 <c:if test="${formtMins==0}">0${fnc:trim('')}</c:if>
  ${fnc:trim(formtMins)}:
  ${fnc:trim(formHours)}
<c:if test="${formHours<10}">0${fnc:trim('')}</c:if>

so the question is how to remove the this white spaces between the time?

Answer 1

Put all the statements on a single line. The newline in JSP puts a space in HTML.

<c:if test="${formtMins==0}">0</c:if> ${formtMins}:${formHours} <c:if test="${formHours<10}">0</c:if>

Is not very nice but it works as far as I remember.

Answer 2

Try using

<%@ page trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true" %>

on your JSP page, or

<jsp-config>
  <jsp-property-group>
    <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
    <trim-directive-whitespaces>true</trim-directive-whitespaces>
  </jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>

in your web.xml to configure white space trimming for all JSP pages.

This is kind of greedy. If you need a space after EL or a tag, you could use ${' '}.