title: Using Regular Expressions in JSP EL
body: <p>In EL expressions, used in a jsp page, strings are taken literally.  For example, in the following code snippet</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;c:when test="${myvar == 'prefix.*'}"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>test does not evaluate to true if the value of myvar is 'prefixxxxx.'   Does anyone know if there is a way to have the string interpreted as a regex instead?  Does EL have something similar to awk's tilde ~ operator?</p>