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2

What characters should be escaped with their HTML entities. For example, & is escaped with &.

Should ' be escaped with '?

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3 Answers

up vote 14 down vote

I don't have comment privileges, or I would have left this as a comment on an earlier answer.

DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT escape an apostrophe in HTML using

'

This is not a valid HTML character entity reference. It is an XML character entity reference. While Firefox and Chrome, at least, will render the above as an apostrophe in an HTML document, Internet Explorer will not. And it is following the standard when it refuses to do so.

You may escape an apostrophe in HTML using

'

But I don't believe it is, in general, necessary.

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/07/01/the_curse_of_apos/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

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up vote 11 down vote

I don't agree with Nate. You should ideally use as little escaping as possible and use UTF-8 to express characters natively. To do this you need an editor that can handle UTF-8 as well as a correct charset declaration, such as:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

However, you should make it a habit to escape the characters that have a special meaning in (X)HTML, namely:

< &lt;
> &gt;
" &quot;
& &amp;
' &#39;

This will make sure you're not accidentally writing markup when you want to write these characters. This is especially important for user input, to maintain security. It's less obvious, but it's actually important to escape ". If a string ever ends up in a HTML attribute (title="something" etc.) the user could end the attribute and insert their own markup. Imagine what happens if the user enters " onclick="alert('hello'); and you insert that to title="..."

If you're using PHP, you can use the htmlspecialchars function to do this. Other languages may have other similar functions.

Update: I stand corrected on the apos issue. Damned pesky IE.

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I've got two contradicting answers now. One recommends escaping ' and the other does not. What should I believe? – Tom Apr 18 '11 at 12:05
4  
In short. You may or may not escape it at your discretion. If you do, use &#39; not &apos;. If, for whatever reason, you use single quotes for a HTML attribute like title='something' you must obviously escape any single quotes inside that the attribute value. – nitro2k01 Apr 18 '11 at 21:32
up vote -3 down vote

The easiest way to do the job without using the actual entity is to use PHP's htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() functions:

$val = htmlspecialchars("Don't", ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
if($_POST){
  $val = htmlspecialchars(trim($_POST['val']), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}
echo "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'> 
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en' lang='en' class='njs'> 
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv='Content-type' content='text/html;charset=utf-8' />
    <title>Special Characters</title>
    <style type='text/css'>
      @import 'special.css';
    </style>
  </head>
<body>
  <form method='post' action='' id='fm' name='fm'>
    <input type='text' value='$val' name='val' id='val' />
    <input type='submit' value='submit' name='sub' id='sub' />
  </form>
</body>
  <script type='text/javascript' src='special.js'></script>
</html>";
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2  
Is this a joke? – Su' Oct 17 '12 at 2:07

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