Question

I’m attempting to create a custom 404 page in CakePHP 2.0 by extending ExceptionRenderer. Everything is working fine except when I output HTML marked-up strings in the View Cake is unwantedly encoding the HTML entities. How can I prevent this from happening?

In my renderer I have:-

class AppExceptionRenderer extends ExceptionRenderer {
    public function missingController($error) {
        $this->controller->set('test', '<p>Test</p>');
        header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
        $this->controller->render('/Errors/error404', 'default');
        $this->controller->set('title_for_layout', 'Page Not Found');
        $this->controller->response->send();
    }
}

In the view (View/Error/error404.ctp):-

<?php echo $test ?>

This outputs <test> rather than <p>test</p>.

In my actual code test will be being set by content from the database as this is a CMS driven site. I’m just setting test in the renderer code above as an example (and to prove the code is behaving as I am observing).

Answer 1

You shouldn’t be using HTML inside your PHP, you should write any markup in the view file.

I’ve not come across a situation when you would need to write the markup inside your PHP code, but if you have no other way around it you could always use the html_entity_decode() function inside your view.

Unfortunately I don’t know a way to stop Cake from encoding it automatically like you want.