Filter problem

[Hehl, Thomas]

OK, I've collided with struts over an issue and would like to know if people
have suggestions on how to solve.

I am reading stuff from an XML file and building parts of my UI from for use
in a JSP. I thought it would be good for some of them to have HTML markup in
them, so I put <, etc in the html file. It goes all the way to struts as
"<" and then struts converts it at the last second so that what gets
displayed is <B>.:(

So how do I stop struts from doing this? So far, I dunno. Here's the code
that causes the problem in ResourceUtils(1.3.5):


    /**
     * Filter the specified string for characters that are senstive to HTML
     * interpreters, returning the string with these characters replaced by
     * the corresponding character entities.
     *
     * @param value The string to be filtered and returned
     */
    public static String filter(String value) {
        if ((value == null) || (value.length() == 0)) {
            return value;
        }

        StringBuffer result = null;
        String filtered = null;

        for (int i = 0; i < value.length(); i++) {
            filtered = null;

            switch (value.charAt(i)) {
            case '<':
                filtered = "&lt;";

                break;

            case '>':
                filtered = "&gt;";

                break;

            case '&':
                filtered = "&amp;";

                break;

            case '"':
                filtered = "&quot;";

                break;

            case '\'':
                filtered = "&#39;";

                break;
            }

            if (result == null) {
                if (filtered != null) {
                    result = new StringBuffer(value.length() + 50);

                    if (i > 0) {
                        result.append(value.substring(0, i));
                    }

                    result.append(filtered);
                }
            } else {
                if (filtered == null) {
                    result.append(value.charAt(i));
                } else {
                    result.append(filtered);
                }
            }
        }

        return (result == null) ? value : result.toString();
    }

I think it is uncharitable for struts to change these with no option to
prevent it. I am thinking about adding &open; and &close; and resolving them
here to turn them back into < and > respectively. Any other ideas, comments,
suggestions?

Thanks.