Re: xml escapedness

Steve Holden wrote:
Robin Becker wrote:
Tim van der Leeuw wrote:
On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Robin Becker <robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A colleague has decided to keep his django database string values (which
are xml
fragments) in an xml escaped form to avoid having the problem of escaping
them
when they are used in templates etc etc.

Unfortunately he found that the normal admin doesn't escape on the way
through
so thought of adding a standard mechanism to the save methods. However,
this
brings in the possibility of escaping twice ie once in his original
capture code
and then in the django save methods.

Well -- you escape them in the save() method only when they contain XML
charachters like <, > ? How about that, wouldn't that work?

--Tim

......
That might work, but there are all the ampersands etc etc to consider as well. So an escaped string could contain &, but so can a raw string.

by the way, be careful - the Django trunk is already modified to perform escaping by default, so if your colleague is using 0.96 or older he should really look at the implications of that change on his design decision. Storing XML in escaped for is always dodgy, much better to escape when necessary (and when some other tool isn't doing it for you). that is, after all, the canonical form.

regards
Steve

I agree wholeheartedly, I would prefer raw in the db. Since we're scraping for some of the content it's hard to eliminate all xml though.
--
Robin Becker

.

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