How do I html encode text inside Action Script 3? - actionscript-3

I have an app that builds XML, the text nodes values are coming from the users.
How would I HTML encode that input to avoid bad characters?
Preferably looking for a built in solution in Action Script.

I've used escape() and unescape() for POST variables in the past, not sure if it's the best solution for XML though.
This method seems promising: http://www.markledford.com/blog/2009/02/25/as3-htmldecode-htmlencode-xml-hack/
You can also try converting the string to a textnode as mentioned in How do you encode XML safely with ActionScript 3?

Related

JSON: Display JSON String on HTML website

I would like my webpage to display what resembles JASON Parser
does (right panel). I first installed JSONView on my Chrome.
Then I composed a string {"isbn":"asdf","name":"qwer","price":1} which I fed to JSON Parser and made sure it indeed obeyed JSON format.
Eventually, I attempted to display it on my webpage by doing:
out.println("{\"isbn\":\"asdf\",\"name\":\"qwer\",\"price\":1}\");
but it was simply displayed like any other normal String instead of being formatted like this.
How do I manage to make my webpage automatically display JSON formatted?
Thanks!
Edit: I didn't realise this was JSP. The answer I'm giving relates to using the JavaScript method JSON.stringify() which you'd somehow achieve within client-side JavaScript within your JSP project.
Use JSON.stringify() to 'pretty-print' the original JavaScript object.
For example, to have two spaces of indentation:
var str = JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2);
If this has to be achieved within Java code then you could use the GSON library. Example: Pretty-Print JSON in Java

My backbone marionette model contains a field with escaped html in it. How do I render that field's contents as HTML and not text?

Classic problem. Want to see html rendered but I'm seeing text in the browser. Whether I tell handlebars js to decode it or not in template ( three curly braces vs two - {{{myHtmlData}}} vs {{myHtmlData}} ) doesn't get me there. Something about the JSON being returned via the model.fetch() has this html data wrapped up in such a way that it is resistant to the notion of displaying as HTML. It's always considered a string whether encoded or decoded so it always displays as text.
Is this just something backbone isn't meant to do?
The technologies involved here are:
backbone.marionette
handlebars.js
.NET Web API
Your data is being escaped automatically. It's a good thing, but since you're sure the data is a safe HTML. Use {{{}}} as in this other question Insert html in a handlebar template without escaping .

Why do I need XSS library while I can use Html-encode?

I'm trying to understand why do I need to use XSS library when I can merely do HtlEncode when sending data from server to client ...?
For example , here in Stackoverflow.com - the editor - all the SO tem neads to do is save the user input and display it with html encode.
This way - there will never going to be a HTML tag - which is going to be executed.
I'm probably wrong here -but can you please contradict my statement , or exaplain?
For example :
I know that IMG tag for example , can has onmouseover , onload which a user can do malicious scripts , but the IMG won't event run in the browser as IMG since it's <img> and not <img>
So - where is the problem ?
HTML-encoding is itself one feature an “XSS library” might provide. This can be useful when the platform doesn't have a native HTML encoder (eg scriptlet-based JSP) or the native HTML encoder is inadequate (eg not escaping quotes for use in attributes, or ]]> if you're using XHTML, or #{} if you're worried about cross-origin-stylesheet-inclusion attacks).
There might also be other encoders for other situations, for example injecting into JavaScript strings in a <script> block or URL parameters in an href attribute, which are not provided directly by the platform/templating language.
Another useful feature an XSS library could provide might be HTML sanitisation, for when you want to allow the user to input data in HTML format, but restrict which tags and attributes they use to a safe whitelist.
Another less-useful feature an XSS library could provide might be automated scanning and filtering of input for HTML-special characters. Maybe this is the kind of feature you are objecting to? Certainly trying to handle HTML-injection (an output stage issue) at the input stage is a misguided approach that security tools should not be encouraging.
HTML encoding is only one aspect of making your output safe against XSS.
For example, if you output a string to JavaScript using this code:
<script>
var enteredName = '<%=EnteredNameVariableFromServer %>';
</script>
You will be wanting to hex entity encode the variable for proper insertion in JavaScript, not HTML encode. Suppose the value of EnteredNameVariableFromServer is O'leary, then the rendered code when properly encoded will become:
<script>
var enteredName = 'O\x27leary';
</script>
In this case this prevents the ' character from breaking out of the string and into the JavaScript code context, and also ensures proper treatment of the variable (HTML encoding it would result in the literal value of O'leary being used in JavaScript, affecting processing and display of the value).
Side note:
Also, that's not quite true of Stack Overflow. Certain characters still have special meanings like in the <!-- language: lang-none --> tag. See this post on syntax highlighting if you're interested.

linqtoxml - insert string literal into xml file

I am using LINQ-to-XML. I am building a small program that helps parse HTML. I'd like to save the HTML tags into an XML file, but I don't want the XML file to check the validity of the entered HTML elements.
How can I just entere a simple string literal (a pretty long one)?
Maybe using a CDATA construct could help you out, see w3schools.com

parse html in adobe air

I am trying to load and parse html in adobe air. The main purpose being to extract title, meta tags and links. I have been trying the HTMLLoader but I get all sort of errors, mainly javascript uncaught exceptions.
I also tried to load the html content directly (using URLLoader) and push the text into HTMLLoader (using loadString(...)) but got the same error. Last resort was to try and load the text into xml and then use E4X queries or xpath, no luck there cause the html is not well formed.
My questions are:
Is there simple and reliable (air/action script) DOM component there (I do not need to display the page and headless mode will do)?
Is there any library to convert (crappy) html into well formed xml so I can use xpath/E4X
Any other suggestions on how to do this?
thx
ActionScript is supposed to be a superset of JavaScript, and thankfully, there's...
Pure JavaScript/ActionScript HTML Parser
created by Javascript guru and jQuery creator John Resig :-)
One approach is to run the HTML through HTMLtoXML() then use E4X as you please :)
Afaik:
No :-(
No :-(
I think the easiest way to grab title and meta tags is writing some regular expressions. You can load the page's HTML code into a string and then read out whatever you need like this:
var str:String = ""; // put HTML code in here
var pattern:RegExp = /<title>(.+)<\/title>/i;
trace(pattern.exec(str));