EL doubt?

Guys, in the following code how do we get the o/p EL in either syntax? What happens in the background when we hit the EL and how the o/p is evaluated?

<html>
<head><title>As a normal JSP</title></head>
<body>
<% request.setAttribute("whichever", "EL in either syntax"); %>
<p>${whichever}</p>
</body></html>

This expression will look for the attribute named whichever, searching the page, request, session, and application scopes, and will return its value. If the attribute is not found, null is returned.

So it will do a pageContext.findAttribute(). Now what if I'm not trying to display any attribute but rather just a text?

I'm not a container provider, but I'd say that it looks for a String and just prints it.

String -With single and double quotes - " is escaped as \", ' is escaped as \', and \ is escaped as \\. Quotes only need to be escaped in a string value enclosed in the same type of quote