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OllyHodgson/encoding.htm;

Created November 30, 2012 11:25
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While testing a system, we found some "interesting" HTML encoding behaviour. For a given value of "interesting", obviously.
Raw
encoding.htm;
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Escaping fun!</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Renders as 'abcd' -->
<p>abcd<efg</p>
<!-- Renders as 'abcd<&efg' -->
<p>abcd<&efg</p>
</body>
</html>
@OllyHodgson
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The first paragraph is rendered as "abcd". Presumably the browser sees everything after the less than symbol as part of an HTML tag. Put an ampersand immediately after it though, and it renders the whole paragraph to the page. I suspect it's because it knows tags cannot start with an ampersand, or sees it as an invalid entity, so outputs it as plain text.

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