this template variable {{object.video.description}} is outputing this text:
Welcome to <a href="http://google.com">Saint Francis Academy</a> in the heart of Washington.
How can I get the link to show as an actual link instead of being replaced with html entities. I tried filtering it as safe but no luck: {{object.video.description|safe}}
Can you go to the django shell and see what text is recorded in object.video.description?
How/where does video.description get defined as an html string (what I'm guessing is that a < is already be escaped into < at that point and hence safe won't help). Marking as safe prevents django from converting < to < right before rendering in the template; but won't convert a string containing < into a <.
If the string is originally saved with <s and >s you can convert them to < and > by a simple python replacement somewhere in your string processing. E.g., in your view do something like:
htmlCodes = (('&', '&'),
('<', '<'),
('>', '>'),
('"', '"'),
("'", '''),)
def unescape(some_html_str):
for c, html_code in htmlCodes:
some_html_str = some_html_str.replace(html_code, c)
return some_html_str
and then remember to unescape your string in your view before putting it in the context (and still remember to mark it safe). See How do I perform HTML decoding/encoding using Python/Django?
Also it may be better/easier for you to use mark_safe (from django.utils.safestring import mark_safe) in your views to make sure only safe strings are marked safe rather than have your template always render something safe.
{% load markup %}
{{ object.video.description|markdown }}
[some_text](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown). Now if users are writing text descriptions, its a very good idea to use a markup language docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/markup (rather than letting users write raw html where they could insert javascript for say a CSRF attack or javascript pop-ups or whatever).