Maybe I\'m just thinking about this too hard, but I\'m having a problem figuring out what escaping to use on a string in some JavaScript code inside a link\'s onClick handle
I have faced this problem as well. I made a script to convert single quotes into escaped double quotes that won't break the HTML.
function noQuote(text)
{
var newtext = "";
for (var i = 0; i < text.length; i++) {
if (text[i] == "'") {
newtext += "\"";
}
else {
newtext += text[i];
}
}
return newtext;
}
I faced the same problem, and I solved it in a tricky way. First make global variables, v1, v2, and v3. And in the onclick, send an indicator, 1, 2, or 3 and in the function check for 1, 2, 3 to put the v1, v2, and v3 like:
onclick="myfun(1)"
onclick="myfun(2)"
onclick="myfun(3)"
function myfun(var)
{
if (var ==1)
alert(v1);
if (var ==2)
alert(v2);
if (var ==3)
alert(v3);
}
Use the Microsoft Anti-XSS library which includes a JavaScript encode.
Depending on the server-side language, you could use one of these:
.NET 4.0
string result = System.Web.HttpUtility.JavaScriptStringEncode("jsString")
Java
import org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils;
...
String result = StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript(jsString);
Python
import json
result = json.dumps(jsString)
PHP
$result = strtr($jsString, array('\\' => '\\\\', "'" => "\\'", '"' => '\\"',
"\r" => '\\r', "\n" => '\\n' ));
Ruby on Rails
<%= escape_javascript(jsString) %>
Declare separate functions in the <head> section and invoke those in your onClick method. If you have lots you could use a naming scheme that numbers them, or pass an integer in in your onClicks and have a big fat switch statement in the function.
Any good templating engine worth its salt will have an "escape quotes" function. Ours (also home-grown, where I work) also has a function to escape quotes for javascript. In both cases, the template variable is then just appended with _esc or _js_esc, depending on which you want. You should never output user-generated content to a browser that hasn't been escaped, IMHO.