Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com
From: "E!" <tenchi@cisco.com>
Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.problems.internet
Subject: Edit website tag formatting error...
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 1998 18:30:14 -0800
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Hm... a funky error that I got while editing my Yaroze site today.
The members site editor
 
        http://www.scea.sony.com/net/yaroze/pages/edithtml.cgi
 
has a formatting error.  Any "escaped" sequences are not "unescaped"
when you edit your page for a second time.

Example:
 
        - edit your HTML for any page, insert the following, and 
          then click "Enter Changes":
          
                This like has a less-than sign: &lt;.<BR>
                This one has a greater-than sign: &gt;.
        
        - the HTML output should look like:
 
                This like has a less-than sign: <.
                This one has a greater-than sign: >.

        - this is fine.  However, now look at the HTML code in the
          textarea box when you edit the page again:
                
                This like has a less-than sign: <.<BR>
                This one has a greater-than sign: >.
 
While this normally wouldn't concern me, what if you had the following
statement in your page:
 
        This page is great!  &lt;g&gt;<BR>

The next time you edit it, you would see in the textarea box:
                
        This page is great!  <g><BR>
        
So, a subsequent "Enter Changes" would result in the creation of a "<G>"
tag, at which point the browsers will either ignore it or become
confused.
 
When the CGI recreates the page, it should probably at least do the
following:
        
        - turn all " into &quot;
        - turn all < into &lt;
 
The text in the textarea box should be correct.  If it's in Perl, this
is something I commonly use when formatting output:
 
        # in:   any amount of text you want Web-ized
        # out:  a formatted set of strings
        # desc: formats a series of text strings for browsers ^_^
        sub WebString
        {
        my( @input ) = @_;
        my( @output,$line );
 
        @output = ();
        foreach $line (@input)
          {
          $line =~ s/\&/\&amp;/g;
          $line =~ s/</\&lt;/g;
          $line =~ s/>/\&gt;/g;
          $line =~ s/\"/\&quot;/g;
        
          push( @output,$line );
          }  # foreach $line (@input)
        
        return( @output );
        }  
          
Thanks!

- Elliott
  tenchi@netmagic.net
  www.netmagic.net/~tenchi