Question

I have the following string:

teststring= "&sect"

When I print it in python within Django I keep getting a weird symbol. How do I make it so that it eliminates the conversion of a string to ASCII symbol and treats it as the literal string “&sect”

Answer 1

Your browser is interpreting the &sect value as §, the section character: §

You need to escape the ampersand as &sect to prevent this:

teststring = "&sect"

Django templates can do this escaping for you by using the escape filter, or you can use the cgi.escape() function:

teststring = cgi.escape("&sect")