Learn Web Development with Python

How Django helps

You might have observed that my example was an extremely unusual way of implementing a view in Django for two reasons: it did not use templates for rendering, and form classes were not used. Both of them have XSS-prevention measures.

By default, Django templates auto-escape HTML special characters. So, if you had displayed the search string in a template, all the tags would have been HTML encoded. This makes it impossible to inject scripts unless you explicitly turn them off by marking the content as safe.

Using form classes in Django to validate and sanitize the input is also a very effective countermeasure. For example, if your application requires a numeric employee ID, then use an IntegerField class rather than the more ...