How to prevent user content from messing up my markup?

Rails
1

On my website, I have a page that allows users to leave comments. I’m
using Rick O.'s Whitelist plugin (http://svn.techno-weenie.net/
projects/plugins/white_list/) to only allow a, b and i tags in user
comments. This works great to escape other HTML tags, but it still
allows the user to improperly use the allowed tags in a way that
screws up my markup. For example, someone can use an opening i tag
and forget to close it. My markup will of course no longer validate.
I don’t know how the different browsers handle it, but at least on
firefox, everything after the opening i tag will be italics.

How do I prevent user content that can contain a few whitelisted html
tags from screwing up my markup?

Thanks!

2

On 18 Apr 2008, at 03:32, Myron M. wrote:

How do I prevent user content that can contain a few whitelisted html
tags from screwing up my markup?

You could always check if the markup is valid, and if not just escape
all the html out of it.

Fred

3

On Apr 18, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Frederick C. wrote:

allows the user to improperly use the allowed tags in a way that

Fred

Use Hpricot?

irb> require ‘rubygems’; gem ‘hpricot’
=> true
irb> require ‘hpricot’
=> true
irb> h = Hpricot(“bolditalic, too”)
=> #<Hpricot::Doc {elem “bold” {elem “italic, too”} }>
irb> h.to_html
=> “bolditalic, too”

Note that the closing is added.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

4

Guys, thanks for your help. Hpricot worked like a charm. I had heard
of hpricot before but had forgotten about it and never tried it.

On Apr 19, 3:00 am, Rob B. [email protected]