Generate RSS in JSP? Set the locale!
The RSS pubDate fields contain dates in a format that may be human readable, but not very handy in a programmer’s point of view. According to the RSS specification the date must conform to the RFC822 specification. A typical RSS snippet looks like:
<item>
<title>Generate RSS in JSP? Set the locale!</title>
<description><p>Description of the feed item</p></description>
<link>http://blog.jasha.eu/2009/12/generate-rss-in-jsp-set-locale.html</link>
<guid>http://blog.jasha.eu/2009/12/generate-rss-in-jsp-set-locale.html</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2009 09:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
</item>
A way to format a java.util.Date
in JSP is using the fmt library from JSTL.
<%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" %>
<item>
<title>${item.title}</title>
<description>
<![CDATA[<hst:html hippohtml="${item.html}"/>]]>
</description>
<link>${link}</link>
<guid>${link}</guid>
<pubDate>
<fmt:formatDate value="${item.date.time}"
pattern="EE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z"/>
</pubDate>
</item>
This seems to look good when you request the RSS feed from your browser. However when you request the same feed from a Java (ROME), a request generator (Fiddler) or just use wget the format of the pubDate field is invalid. It returns Wed Dec 10 09:55:00 CET 2009
instead of Wed, 10 Dec 2009 09:55:00 +0100
as value of pubDate
. What happened?
Your browser sends a header Accept-Language
with, hopefully, en-US
as first value. The JSTL library uses the en-US locale to format the date and the feed gets parsed correctly. The other tools don’t send this header and the programmer did not specify a locale for fmt. fmt does not know how to format the date and returns a Date.getString();
.
A workaround for you as requester of the feed is to manually add the "Accept-Language" header to the request with value en-US
. For the JSP developer: the date format for RSS should always be en_US
. Just add this line to your JSP:
<fmt:setLocale value="en_US"/>