Thanks! I'll pass this to the author.

Out of curiosity I've started looking in Django docs (I'm more of a flask person myself), and they seems to confirm what you're saying. More to the point, the `strings` are the main issue. The default autoescape actually encodes ' and " as HTML entities, but doesn't encode a backslash, so leaving a \ at end of a ' or " string would escape the string ending - this would be exploitable if the attacker controls two strings of the same "type' in a row.

I guess this is the proper way to do it: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/templates/builtins...

If you're interested to explore lots of XSS edge cases, I've found this CTF to be enjoyable.

https://alf.nu/alert1

All JSON serializers worth their salt can serialize a single string to JSON, so the simplest way is to do json.dumps(the_string) and mark the string as safe so that it doesn't get escaped twice.

Simple JSON encoding alone is not sufficient if you put the output into a <script> tag.

<script>const user_input = "</script><script>alert(1)//"; ...

Thanks @GICodeWarrior for taking time commenting on the article. Shamefully, I can already imagine a scenario on how the attack could be carried out. Fortunately, the vulnerability can be corrected by introducing escapejs template filter. Big thanks to @gynvael.

Encoding for each scenario can be quite complex unfortunately. Django does have some template filters to help.

I recommend following the documentation carefully, and using a JSON API or other similarly standard mechanism if the documented options are insufficient.