---
title: "how to escape variables in jinja templates"
description: "While updating my site to use Markata's new configurable head I ran into some escaping issues. Things like single quotes would cause jinja to fail as it was..."
date: 2022-09-24
published: true
tags:
- python
template: til
---
While updating my site to use Markata's new configurable head I ran into some
escaping issues. Things like single quotes would cause jinja to fail as it was
closing quotes that it shouldnt have.
## Jinja Escaping Strings
Jinja comes with a handy utility for escaping strings. I definitly tried to
over-complicate this before realizing. You can just pipe your variables into
`e` to escape them. This has worked pretty flawless at solving some jinja
issues for me.
``` html
{{ title|e }}
```
## Creating meta tags in Markata
The issue I ran into was when trying to setup meta tags with the new
configurable head, some of my titles have single quotes in them. This is what
I put in my `markata.toml` to create some meta tags.
``` toml
[[markata.head.meta]]
name = "og:title"
content = "{{ title }}"
```
Using my article titles like this ended up causing this syntax error when not
escaped.
``` python
SyntaxError: invalid syntax. Perhaps you forgot a comma?
Exception ignored in:
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable
```
## jinja2 escape
After making a complicated system of using `html.escape` I realized that jinja
included escaping out of the box so I updated my `markata.toml` to include the
escaping, and it all just worked!.
``` toml
[[markata.head.meta]]
name = "og:title"
content = "{{ title|e }}"
```
