HTML/JSP Variables

I am wondering is there anyway to define a variable in HTML/JSP. I goo开发者_运维知识库gled very hard but couldn't find any resources on this. Basically in my html/jsp I am trying to save an external value into a variable that's specific to the html/jsp, so that I can print this variable to the webpage afterwards. Let's say this external value is 5. Can we do something like

x=5 ?

T

Do you mean something like this?

<c:set var="x" value="5"/> 
...
${x}

<c:set> is a tag from the JSTL.