Jinja 2 safe keyword

Question

I have a little problem understanding what an expression like {{ something.render() | safe }} does .

From what I have seen, without the safe keyword it outputs the entire html document, not just the true content.

What I would like to know, is what it actually does, how it functions .

Answer 1

The safe filter explicitly marks a string as "safe", i.e., it should not be automatically-escaped if auto-escaping is enabled.

The documentation on this filter is here.

See the section on manual escaping to see which characters qualify for escaping.

Answer 2

Normally text is HTML-escaped (so <b> would be written out as <b>, which would render as <b>).

When you put |safe after something, you're telling the template engine that you have already escaped the text yourself, i.e. "it's safe to render this directly". So it will not do that encoding for you.

For more information: http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/templates/#html-escaping