NOTE: 2026-06-05: Bleach is no longer maintained. There will be no future releases including for security issues. See issue: #698
Bleach is an allowed-list-based HTML sanitizing library that escapes or strips markup and attributes.
Bleach can also linkify text safely, applying filters that Django's urlize
filter cannot, and optionally setting rel attributes, even on links already
in the text.
Bleach is intended for sanitizing text from untrusted sources. If you find yourself jumping through hoops to allow your site administrators to do lots of things, you're probably outside the use cases. Either trust those users, or don't.
Because it relies on html5lib, Bleach is as good as modern browsers at dealing with weird, quirky HTML fragments. And any of Bleach's methods will fix unbalanced or mis-nested tags.
The version on GitHub is the most up-to-date and contains the latest bug fixes. You can find full documentation on ReadTheDocs.
| Code: | https://github.com/mozilla/bleach |
|---|---|
| Documentation: | https://bleach.readthedocs.io/ |
| Issue tracker: | https://github.com/mozilla/bleach/issues |
| License: | Apache License v2; see LICENSE file |
For regular bugs, please report them in our issue tracker.
If you believe that you've found a security vulnerability, please file a secure bug report in our bug tracker or send an email to security AT mozilla DOT org.
For more information on security-related bug disclosure and the PGP key to use for sending encrypted mail or to verify responses received from that address, please read our wiki page at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/#For_Developers.
Bleach is a security-focused library.
We have a responsible security vulnerability reporting process. Please use that if you're reporting a security issue.
Security issues are fixed in private. After we land such a fix, we'll do a release.
For every release, we mark security issues we've fixed in the CHANGES in
the Security issues section. We include any relevant CVE links.
Bleach is available on PyPI, so you can install it with pip:
$ pip install bleach
Warning
Before doing any upgrades, read through Bleach Changes for backwards incompatible changes, newer versions, etc.
Bleach follows semver 2 versioning. Vendored libraries will not be changed in patch releases.
The simplest way to use Bleach is:
>>> import bleach >>> bleach.clean('an <script>evil()</script> example') u'an <script>evil()</script> example' >>> bleach.linkify('an http://example.com url') u'an <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">http://example.com</a> url'
This project and repository is governed by Mozilla's code of conduct and etiquette guidelines. For more details please see the CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md