CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlxhtmlencodingcharacter-encoding
Matt Rogish
Matt Rogish

Reputation: 24873

How to encode quotes in HTML body?

Should I encode quotes (such as " and ' -> &rdquo; and &rsquo;) in my HTML body (e.g. convert <p>Matt's Stuff</p> to <p>Matt&rsquo;s Stuff</p>)? I was under the impression I should, but a co-worker said that it was no big deal. I'm dubious but I can't find anything that says it is forbidden. Am I mistaken? Is it a best-practice to encode? Or is it simply useless?

Upvotes: 14

Views: 53058

Answers (4)

Asaph
Asaph

Reputation: 162851

If you want your markup to be parsable as XML, you'll want to encode the following:

& => &amp;
< => &lt;
> => &gt;
" => &quot;
' => &apos;

Definitely do this in attributes whether you're trying to make your code XML compliant or not.

Upvotes: 8

Guffa
Guffa

Reputation: 700790

Encoding quotation marks (") is in practice only needed if the're inside an attribute, however for the HTML code to be correct (passing HTML validation), you should always encode quotation marks as &quot;.

Apostrophes (') don't need escaping in HTML. In XHTML they should be encoded as &apos;.

Upvotes: 27

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655735

No, you only need to use character references for quotes (single or double) if you want to use them inside an attribute value declaration that uses the same quotes for the value declaration:

title="The sign says &quot;Matt's Stuff&quot;"
title='The sign says "Matt&#39;s Stuff"'

Both title values are The sign says "Matt's Stuff".

Upvotes: 3

Amber
Amber

Reputation: 527378

Typicaly such isn't necessary unless you're placing such values into a tag's attribute (or other places where having quote marks would throw off parsing). In regular body text un-encoded will work fine.

<img src="..." alt="A &quot;quote mark&quot; in an alt attribute" />

Upvotes: 4

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