Escape all strings in JSP/Spring MVC

Question

I display strings in my JSP this way:

${someString}

this string may, of course, contain special html characters. Currently it is possible t

Answer 1

You can use JSTL core :

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>

Use tag to display Strings. escapes HTML characters so that you can avoid cross-site scripting, you can specify that by setting the attribute escapeXml=true. Another advantage is that you can also provide a default value in case the value evaluates to null.

You can also use fn:escapeXml() EL function. You need to include JSTL functions for that .

<%@ taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>

Another possible way , will be build a custom ELResolver.

Enables customization of variable and property resolution behavior for EL expression evaluation.

This blog provides a working example of how it can be done.

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For the entire Spring MVC app , you can specify the escaping in the web.xml:

   defaultHtmlEscape
   true

But then the escaping applies only to the spring tags , like :

Lastly , you can try the third-party library XSSFilter.