title: Generating ordinal characters in JSP EL
body: <p>Take the following JSP fragment:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;c:forEach items="${items}" varStatus="status"&gt;
     ${'A' + status.index}
  &lt;/c:forEach&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The intent should clear, I'm trying to generate an 'A'-based character index for each iterations through the loop. In Java, this is fine (e.g. <code>'A' + 1 == 'B'</code>), but JSP EL on Tomcat 6 barfs with <code>java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "A"</code>. It seems it cannot handle characters as ordinal values.</p>
  
  <p>The current solution breaks this out into a custom taglib, but this is absurd for something so trivial.</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone see how to persuade EL to do this calculation?</p>