Source Allies Blog » tomcat http://blogs.sourceallies.com Technical and process thinking from Source Allies employees Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:35:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Strict Quote Escaping in Tomcat http://blogs.sourceallies.com/2009/10/strict-quote-escaping-in-tomcat/ http://blogs.sourceallies.com/2009/10/strict-quote-escaping-in-tomcat/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:05:54 +0000 Zach Cox http://blogs.sourceallies.com/?p=219 I just started here at Source Allies (loving it here so far, btw!) and inherited an aging code base to resurrect.  It was originally deployed on Tomcat 5 and one of the issues I encountered upgrading to Tomcat 6 was strict quote escaping.  The code base has lots of JSPs with elements like this:

<some:tag title=”<%=(String)request.getAttribute(”title”)%>”>

Apparently this used to fly under the radar up until Tomcat 5.5.26, but Tomcat 5.5.27+ enforces the quoting requirements of the JSP spec.  Running this app with Tomcat 6 produced lots of exceptions like this one:

javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: ServletException in ‘/WEB-INF/content/admin/editUser.jsp’: /WEB-INF/content/admin/editUser.jsp(6,23) Attribute value (String)request.getAttribute(”title”) is quoted with ” which must be escaped when used within the value

Now, we all know that double-quotes within double-quotes is a no-no and should be fixed by either using single quotes to enclose the attribute value:

<some:tag title=’<%=(String)request.getAttribute(”title”)%>’>

or by escaping the inner double-quotes:

<some:tag title=”<%=(String)request.getAttribute(\”title\”)%>”>

However in this case we just needed to get the app up & running quickly so I found a quick, temporary workaround instead of fixing all of the improperly formatted quotes.  Setting org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser.STRICT_QUOTE_ESCAPING=false in $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/catalina.properties allows the double-quotes within double-quotes, and no more exceptions!

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