NAME

HTML::Mason::Escapes - Functions to escape text for Mason

DESCRIPTION

This module contains functions for implementing Mason's substitution escaping feature. These functions may also be called directly.

html_entities_escape

This function takes a scalar reference and HTML-escapes it using the "HTML::Entities" module. By default, this module assumes that the string it is escaping is in ISO-8859-1 (pre Perl 5.8.0) or UTF-8 (Perl 5.8.0 onwards). If this is not the case for your data, you will want to override this escape to do the right thing for your encoding. See the section on User-defined Escapes in the Developer's Manual for more details on how to do this.

url_escape

This takes a scalar reference and replaces any text it contains matching "[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]" with the URL-escaped equivalent, a percent sign (%) followed by the hexadecimal number of that character.

basic_html_escape

This function takes a scalar reference and HTML-escapes it, escaping the following characters: '&', '>', '<', and '"'.

It is provided for those who wish to use it to replace (or supplement) the existing 'h' escape flag, via the Interpreter's set_escape() method.

This function is provided in order to allow people to return the HTML escaping behavior in 1.0x. However, this behavior presents a potential security risk of allowing cross-site scripting attacks. HTML escaping should always be done based on the character set a page is in. Merely escaping the four characters mentioned above is not sufficient. The quick summary of why is that for some character sets, characters other than '<' may be interpreted as a "less than" sign, meaning that just filtering '<' and '>' will not stop all cross-site scripting attacks. See http://www.megasecurity.org/Info/cross-site_scripting.txt for more details.