How do I properly escape quotes inside HTML attributes?

Question

I have a drop down on a web page which is breaking when the value string contains a quote.

The value is \"asd, but in the DOM it always appears as an em

Answer 1

You really should only allow untrusted data into a whitelist of good attributes like: align, alink, alt, bgcolor, border, cellpadding, cellspacing, class, color, cols, colspan, coords, dir, face, height, hspace, ismap, lang, marginheight, marginwidth, multiple, nohref, noresize, noshade, nowrap, ref, rel, rev, rows, rowspan, scrolling, shape, span, summary, tabindex, title, usemap, valign, value, vlink, vspace, width

You really want to keep untrusted data out of javascript handlers as well as id or name attributes (they can clobber other elements in the DOM).

Also, if you are putting untrusted data into a SRC or HREF attribute, then its really a untrusted URL so you should validate the URL, make sure its NOT a javascript: URL, and then HTML entity encode.

More details on all of there here: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Abridged_XSS_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet