populating textboxes with less than / greater than symbols (< and >)

Question

so I've been running into some problems where in various parts of my website I'm developing, I'm displaying some logs that contain < and > symbols in various spots. Well when I display the log it works fine. Of course anytime I navigate away I get an error of:

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client ...

Now I understand it's because < and > are html special characters which I get. But, is there any way to disable or somehow allow the page to display / process those? I know I could strip those characters out of anyplace they may appear, but I'd rather not if I don't have to.

Any suggestions?

Please don't prefix your titles with "C# / ASP.net " and such. That's what the tags are for. — John Saunders, Jan 19 '12 at 21:02
possible duplicate of [A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81991/a-potentially-dangerous-request-form-value-was-detected-from-the-client) — Charlino, Jan 19 '12 at 21:05

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:02

5

You didn't post any code, so I will assume you want something along the lines of:

<textbox><</textbox>

It's simple really, HTML encode your content:

<textbox>&lt;</textbox>

You can use HttpUtility.HtmlEncode to do this.

answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:02

zzzzBov

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:04

2

Replace ">" with ">" and "<" with "<"

Read this see a list of HTMLs special entities

answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:04

acermate433s

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:05

If you simply want your web application to allow form input to contain potentially dangerous characters there are a few ways to do this depending on framework. I mostly use MVC myself, where you use the [ValidateInput(false)] attribute on your controller actions.

For WebForms, I'll direct you here instead.. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/bt244wbb.aspx :)

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Jan 19 '12 at 21:37

0

to answer your question put ValidateRequest="false" in <%@Page...

be careful, as you are now responsible for prevent script attacks

edited Jan 19 '12 at 21:37

favo

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answered Jan 19 '12 at 21:30

peroija

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populating textboxes with less than / greater than symbols (< and >)

4 Answers4