How good is the Rails sanitize() method?

Posted by Horace Loeb on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Horace Loeb
Published on 2010-06-06T19:32:46Z Indexed on 2010/06/07 8:02 UTC
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ruby-on-rails

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xss

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sanitize

Can I use ActionView::Helpers::SanitizeHelper#sanitize on user-entered text that I plan on showing to other users? E.g., will it properly handle all cases described on this site?

Also, the documentation mentions:

Please note that sanitizing user-provided text does not guarantee that the resulting markup is valid (conforming to a document type) or even well-formed. The output may still contain e.g. unescaped ’<’, ’>’, ’&’ characters and confuse browsers.

What's the best way to handle this? Pass the sanitized text through Hpricot before displaying?

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