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Great Expectations 1.18.1 - Data Docs HTML Escaping Fix

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Great Expectations 1.18.1 is a patch release for the open source data validation framework, published on 11 June 2026. The single functional change corrects HTML escaping for regex angle brackets in Data Docs, a rendering bug that could distort validation reports when expectations use pattern syntax containing < or > characters.

The full release notes and downloads are on the GitHub release page.

Data Docs regex rendering fix

Data Docs is the HTML report layer that turns expectation suite results into browsable documentation. Teams rely on it to share validation outcomes with analysts, pipeline owners, and on call engineers who may never touch the Python API directly.

The bug addressed in PR #11909 involved regex patterns that contain angle brackets. When those patterns appeared in rendered Data Docs output, the brackets were not HTML escaped. Browsers could interpret them as markup rather than literal characters. That breaks page structure, hides part of the regex string, or produces misleading output in expectation detail panels.

For data engineers, this matters in practice. Regex based expectations are common for column format checks, partial string matches, and log line parsing rules. A pattern like <[A-Z]+> or a capture group written with angle bracket notation can show up in failed expectation summaries. Before 1.18.1, those reports were unreliable in the HTML view even when the underlying validation logic ran correctly.

The fix is narrow in scope. It does not change how expectations evaluate against your data. It only affects how regex text is serialized into Data Docs HTML. If your suites avoid angle brackets in regex strings, you may not notice a difference. If you publish Data Docs to a shared static site or embed them in a monitoring portal, upgrading removes a class of silent display errors.

Documentation cleanup

Two documentation pull requests ship with this tag and carry no runtime impact, but they reflect how the project presents itself to operators evaluating the stack.

PR #11900 syncs the docs version label to the released 1.18.0 line. Version labels on documentation sites are easy to drift out of sync with PyPI tags. Mismatched labels confuse anyone comparing install instructions against the package they already have pinned in a requirements file or lockfile.

PR #11906 removes the GX Cloud docs site from the documentation tree. Great Expectations remains an open source validation library under the great-expectations/great_expectations repository. The docs change signals that cloud specific hosting documentation is no longer maintained in that path. Teams running self hosted checkpoints, file based Data Docs, or custom orchestration around great_expectations validation actions should treat the open source docs and the GitHub release page as the authoritative references for this version line.

BigQuery and Snowflake test skips

The remaining items are maintenance only. PR #11908 temporarily skips BigQuery integration tests. PR #11911 does the same for Snowflake integration tests.

These skips do not remove connectors from the package. They reduce continuous integration coverage for two warehouse backends that many ELT pipelines depend on. If you validate tables in BigQuery or Snowflake through Great Expectations batch requests or SQLAlchemy execution engines, treat this as a signal to run your own smoke tests after upgrade rather than assuming green CI on every edge case.

Temporary skips often follow credential rotation, upstream API changes, or flaky hosted test fixtures. They are worth watching in subsequent releases to see when those suites return.

Where to get it

This is a stable release, not a prerelease or release candidate.

Install or pin with your usual package manager, for example pip install great-expectations==1.18.1, then regenerate Data Docs for any suite that renders regex based expectations to HTML.