cgi/perl/html - what characters to escape when printing into html?

Question

I got an input file that I need to print directly into an html page.

I did $inputfile =~ s/\\n/<br>/g; Are there any other special characters I should be aware of maybe other than < and > when printing this $inputfile to html?

Answer 1

You absolutely should use HTML::Escape instead of doing some ill-conceived hackjob which will cause everyone who deals with your code (you included) to curse your name in the future.

It's simple - install HTML::Escape via CPAN, then use it thus:

use HTML::Escape qw(escape_html);
my $escaped_string = escape_html($string);

Note that if you want to preserve whitespace formatting you should use a module to do that, as well, such as HTML::FromText - the above code will not automagically convert line breaks to
tags because that's different completely from escaping unsafe characters to HTML entities.