When should I use escape and safe in Django's template system?

Question

If I have a box where people put comments, and then I display that comment like this...should I escape?

{{ c.title }}

Answer 1

Actually, it depends. Django's templating engine does escaping automatically, so you don't really need to escape.

If you add template filter "safe" like {{c.title|safe}} then you do need to worry about things like html injection, because "safe" marks the string as such and it means that it won't be escaped.

There is also an {% autoescape on %}...{% endautoescape %} template tag, where "on" can be changed to "off", if necessary. By default it's on and the tag is not needed.

Other template engines may not be escaping by default, Jinja2 is one of them.