title: Comparing strings in EL
body: <p>I'm giving a User object to JSP and want to compare an attribute of the user with a given String. What I'm doing right now is the following:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;input type="radio" name="lang" value="ger" &lt;c:if test="${user.comLanguage.equals("ger")}"&gt;checked="yes"&lt;/c:if&gt;/&gt;German&lt;/br&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But all I get is the following Exception:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-none prettyprint-override"><code>org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /WEB-INF/jsp/library/home.jsp (line: 22, column: 95) equal symbol expected
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where column 95 is one of the letters of <code>comLanguage</code>.</p>
  
  <p>What's the correct syntax here?</p>