Encode Special Characters

[aoeui]

hi,

I never figured this out, what is meant by encoding special characters?

there are reserved characters in HTML, ok we know it

"	"

'	'

&	&

<	<

>	>

but what all should we encode in the body, text etc.?
every single asterisk, brackets, quotation mark, exclamation mark … I dunno

even stuff like this?

(

)

*

!

?

[

]

/

+

-

[jamygolden]

I think people generally encode things that could break their code… for example:

The apostrophe contained within “isn’t” will close the echo and cause some kind of error. Therefore that would be changed to something like:

And the same with HTML. In order to get a less than character in these forums ( < ) we have to use the code, otherwise it will be seen as code. So something like a * and () only needs to be encoded where appropriate.

for the most part, I just deal with <, >, & and ‘

[jamygolden]

Yeah, that’s fine :)

[jamygolden]

When you create a web page, send it through the validator. If it succeeds, you’re all good.

I don’t think I’ve ever encoded:

(

)

*

!

?

[

]

/

+

-

Via the html codes. If I want to escape something in php, I’ll do something like escape($foo);
jQuery seems to escape strings (at least most that I’ve used) for me. It’s pretty smart: for example

$('body').prepend('&');

$('body').prepend('&');

will put
& in the body, which will display as &

If I want to use a ‘ in a js string. Instead of doing this
$('body').prepend('This won't work');
I’ll do this:
$('body').prepend("This won't work");

You don’t need to really worry about all that too much :p

[chrisburton]

@jamy_za But…but..what about..

Edit: Well, I should not skim the article. However, I don’t think everything is necessary to encode. If you have a word that has an apostrophe, use double quotes. You should probably use them anyway just to avoid the issue.

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