database text and '<'

rubyonrails-talk
1

I just typed a long post with my model, controller and view file snippets, and lost it :frowning: Here goes again:

I have a 2 postgres tables: files and lines. Files simply has an id and a string name. Lines has a file_id, line_number and line_text. I have the associations set up nicely so:

@lines = File.find(params[:id]).lines

works nicely. The only problem is that if a line has a '<' in it, anything after the '<' is getting eaten (ie not showing up).

Any ideas?

2

I just typed a long post with my model, controller and view file snippets, and lost it :frowning: Here goes again:

I have a 2 postgres tables: files and lines. Files simply has an id and a string name. Lines has a file_id, line_number and line_text. I have the associations set up nicely so:

@lines = File.find(params[:id]).lines

works nicely. The only problem is that if a line has a '<' in it, anything after the '<' is getting eaten (ie not showing up).

Eaten up where? How are you verifying this? What happens if you run the above in script/console? Any chance it's getting eaten because < is being considered an html tag so swallowing the rest of the text perhaps because there isn't a closing > ? If so, look into escaping/encoding it before you display it.

Maybe...

3

Philip Hallstrom wrote:

Eaten up where? How are you verifying this? What happens if you run the above in script/console? Any chance it's getting eaten because < is being considered an html tag so swallowing the rest of the text perhaps because there isn't a closing > ? If so, look into escaping/encoding it before you display it.

Maybe...

That's exactly what is happening (I figured it out right after I posted). I looked in the page source and all my text was there. the browser sees the '<' and tried to resolve a tag out of it. when it can't all the text between it and the next valid closing tag is eaten. I guess I'll have to replace any '<' with '&lt;' in my controller before passing it to the view

Thanks

4

Philip Hallstrom wrote:

Eaten up where? How are you verifying this? What happens if you run the above in script/console? Any chance it's getting eaten because < is being considered an html tag so swallowing the rest of the text perhaps because there isn't a closing > ? If so, look into escaping/encoding it before you display it.

Maybe...

That's exactly what is happening (I figured it out right after I posted). I looked in the page source and all my text was there. the browser sees the '<' and tried to resolve a tag out of it. when it can't all the text between it and the next valid closing tag is eaten. I guess I'll have to replace any '<' with '&lt;' in my controller before passing it to the view

Thanks

5

The h function will do that.

Fred

6

Philip Hallstrom wrote:

Eaten up where? How are you verifying this? What happens if you run the above in script/console? Any chance it's getting eaten because < is being considered an html tag so swallowing the rest of the text perhaps because there isn't a closing > ? If so, look into escaping/encoding it before you display it.

Maybe...

That's exactly what is happening (I figured it out right after I posted). I looked in the page source and all my text was there. the browser sees the '<' and tried to resolve a tag out of it. when it can't all the text between it and the next valid closing tag is eaten. I guess I'll have to replace any '<' with '&lt;' in my controller before passing it to the view

# Escape special characters in HTML, namely &\"<> CGI::escapeHTML('Usage: foo "bar" <baz>')       # => "Usage: foo &quot;bar&quot; &lt;baz&gt;"