Why do I get an error in my JSP local functions '<%!'?

Question

We have a couple of utility functions declared on class level in jsp. Using <%!.
I get the following error in the line containing only <%!:

Invalid character constant

---

Code:

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" 
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>

<%@page import="java.sql.*"%>
<%@page import="java.util.Vector"%>

<%!

 String var1 = "something";
 ObjectXXX var2 = null;

 void initObjectXXX()
 {
 ...

If I remove the two variables our functions start working. But they were there before and it was working correctly.

What is causing the error?

Answer 1

It could be a character encoding problem. Your JSP header specifies the latin charset, so perhaps someone checked the file into SVN with a different encoding, which is causing the JSP compiler to barf.

Hard to spot or confirm, since the characters look OK visually.