How to disable HTML encoding when using Context in django

Question

In my django application I am using a template to construct email body, one of the parameters is url, note there are two parametes separated by ampersand in the url.

t = loader.get_template("sometemplate")
c = Context({
   'foo': 'bar',
   'url': 'http://127.0.0.1/test?a=1&b=2',
})
print t.render(c)

After rendering it produces: http://127.0.0.1/test?a=1&b=2

Note the ampersand is HTML encoded as "&". One way around the problem is to pass each parameter separately to my template and construct the url in the template, however I'd like to avoid doing that.

Is there a way to disable HTML encoding of context parameters or at the very least avoid encoding of ampersands?

Answer 1

To turn it off for a single variable, use mark_safe:

from django.utils.safestring import mark_safe

t = loader.get_template("sometemplate")
c = Context({
   'foo': 'bar',
   'url': mark_safe('http://127.0.0.1/test?a=1&b=2'),
})
print t.render(c)

Alternatively, to totally turn autoescaping off from your Python code, use the autoescape argument when initialising a Context:

c = Context({
   'foo': 'bar',
   'url': 'http://127.0.0.1/test?a=1&b=2',
}, autoescape=False)

The How to turn [Automatic HTML escaping] off section of the documentation covers some of the in-template options if you'd rather do it there.