Question

I need to tidy user input in a web application so that I remove certain HTML-tags and encode < to &gt etc.

I’ve made a couple of simple util methods that strips the HTML, but I find myself adding these EVERYWHERE in my application.

Is there a smarter way to tidy the user input? E.g. in the binding process, or as a filter somehow?

I’ve seen JTidy that can act as a servlet filter, but I’m not sure that this is what I want because I need to clean user input, not output of my JSP’s.

From JTidy’s homepage:

It can be used as a tool for cleaning up malformed and faulty HTML generated by your dynamic web application.

It can Validate HTML without changing the output and generate warnings for each page so you could identify JSP or Servlet that need to be fixed.

It can save you hours of time. The more HTML you write in JSP or Servlets, the more time you will save. Don’t waste time manually looking for problems, figuring out why your HTML doesn’t display like it should.

In addition to JTidy validation you could submit dynamically generated pages to online HTML validators for example W3C Markup Validation Service, WAVE Accessibility Tool or WDG HTML Validator even if you are behind the firewall.

Answer 1

I find myself adding these EVERYWHERE in my application.

Really? It’s unusual to have many user inputs that accept HTML. Most inputs should be plain text, so that when the user types < they literally get a less-than sign, not a (potentially-tidied/filtered-out) tag. This requires HTML-encoding at the output stage. Typically you’d get that from the <c:out> tag.

(Old-school JSP before JSTL, lamentably, provided no HTML-encoder, so if for some reason that’s what you’re working with you would have to provide your own HTML-encoding method built out of string replacments, or use one of the many third-party tools that contain one.)

For the usually-few-if-any ‘rich text’ fields that are deliberately meant to accept user-supplied HTML, you should be filtering them strongly to prevent JavaScript injection from the markup. This is a difficult job! A “couple of simple util methods that strips the HTML” are highly unlikely to do it correctly and securely.

The proper way to do this is to parse the input HTML into a DOM; walk over it checking that only known-safe element and attribute names are used; then serialise it back to well-formed [X]HTML. There are a number of tools that can do this and yes, jTidy is one. You would use the method Tidy.parseDOM on the input field value, remove unwanted items from the resulting DOM with removeChild and removeAttribute, then reserialise using pprint.

A good alternative to HTML-based rich text is to give the user a simpler form of textual markup that you can then convert to known-safe HTML tags. Like this SO text box I’m typing into now.