Django-TinyMCE Validation Rules

Question

I am using TinyMCE in my Django Admin site. I need to validate that no disallowed HTML Tags get submitted. This is what I tried:

1) Validation Method

    def check_for_invalid_html_tags(value) :
        compiled_regex = re.compile('<(?!/?(p|div|ul|li)(>|\s))[^<]+?>')

        if compiled_regex.match(value):
            raise ValidationError('Invalid Tags')

2) Validation Rule

    content = tinymce_models.HTMLField(validators=[check_for_invalid_html_tags])

This does not seem to work, as any submission is let through as valid. When I change the tinymce_models.HTMLField to models.TextField, the rule works perfectly. Thus I believe that the issue is as a result of TinyMCE.

Can anybody help?

Answer 1

I read the doc and there is a slight difference between match and search

match:

If zero or more characters at the beginning of string ...

search:

Scan through string looking for the first location ...

search() vs. match()

since what your are looking for might be everywhere in your string you need to use search instead of match. An other point, you might neeed to set the fag re.S or re.DOTALL since you might have newline in your input.

Make the '.' special character match any character at all, including a newline; without this flag, '.' will match anything except a newline.

So here is the check_for_invalid_html_tags in a functor and a working solution.

import re

class CheckForInvalidHtmlTags(object):
    compiled_regex = re.compile('<(?!/?(p|div|ul|li)(>|\s))[^<]+?>')

    def __call__(self, value):
        if self.compiled_regex.search(value):
            print 'error'
        else:
            print 'ok'

c = CheckForInvalidHtmlTags()
c('test test <a>test<a> test') # print error
c('test <p> test</p>') # print ok
c('test<a> test</a><p>test</p>test') # print error