[Django]-Sanitizing HTML in submitted form data

strip_tags actually removes the tags from the input, which may not be what you want.

To convert a string to a "safe string" with angle brackets, ampersands and quotes converted to the corresponding HTML entities, you can use the escape filter:

from django.utils.html import escape
message = escape(form.cleaned_data['message'])

Alternatively, there is a Python library called bleach:

Bleach is a whitelist-based HTML sanitization and text linkification library. It is designed to take untrusted user input with some HTML.

Because Bleach uses html5lib to parse document fragments the same way browsers do, it is extremely resilient to unknown attacks, much more so than regular-expression-based sanitizers.

Example:

import bleach
message = bleach.clean(form.cleaned_data['message'], 
                       tags=ALLOWED_TAGS,
                       attributes=ALLOWED_ATTRIBUTES, 
                       styles=ALLOWED_STYLES, 
                       strip=False, strip_comments=True)