Escape HTML using jQuery [duplicate]

Question

That’s a pretty standard way of doing it, my version used a <div> though:

return $('<div/>').text(t).html();

This isn’t technically 100% safe though as Mike Samuel notes but it is probably pretty safe in practice.

The current Prototype.js does this:

function escapeHTML() {
    return this.replace(/&/g,'&amp;').replace(/</g,'&lt;').replace(/>/g,'&gt;');
}

But it used to use the “put text in a div and extract the HTML” trick.

There’s also _.escape in Underscore, that does it like this:

// List of HTML entities for escaping.
var htmlEscapes = {
  '&': '&amp;',
  '<': '&lt;',
  '>': '&gt;',
  '"': '&quot;',
  "'": '&#x27;',
  "https://stackoverflow.com/": '&#x2F;'
};

// Regex containing the keys listed immediately above.
var htmlEscaper = /[&<>"'\/]/g;

// Escape a string for HTML interpolation.
_.escape = function(string) {
  return ('' + string).replace(htmlEscaper, function(match) {
    return htmlEscapes[match];
  });
};

That’s pretty much the same approach as Prototype’s. Most of the JavaScript I do lately has Underscore available so I tend to use _.escape these days.

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