JSP Horror!

I no longer work with Coldfusion on a daily basis, but I have discovered why people use it. JSPs are even worse! It seems that the only way to replace newlines in a string is to assign a newline to a variable, and then use that.

<c:set var="nl" value="
" />
<input type="hidden" name="address" value='${fn:replace(user.address, nl, "&#10;")}'/>

This just seems so flaky.

Is there not a better way? (And I'm not sure that writing a custom tag is a better way).