Most efficient way to escape XML/HTML in C++ string?

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Instead of just replacing in the original string, you can do copying with on-the-fly replacement which avoids having to move characters in the string. This will have much better complexity and cache behavior, so I’d expect a huge improvement. Or you can use boost::spirit::xml encode or http://code.google.com/p/pugixml/.

void encode(std::string& data) {
    std::string buffer;
    buffer.reserve(data.size());
    for(size_t pos = 0; pos != data.size(); ++pos) {
        switch(data[pos]) {
            case '&':  buffer.append("&");       break;
            case '\"': buffer.append(""");      break;
            case '\'': buffer.append("'");      break;
            case '<':  buffer.append("&lt;");        break;
            case '>':  buffer.append("&gt;");        break;
            default:   buffer.append(&data[pos], 1); break;
        }
    }
    data.swap(buffer);
}

EDIT: A small improvement can be achieved by using an heuristic to determine the size of the buffer. Replace the buffer.reserve line with data.size()*1.1 (10%) or something similar depending of how much replacements are expected.

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