Can I escape html special chars in javascript?

Question

I want to display a text to HTML by a javascript function. How can I escape html special chars in JS? Is there an API ?

Answer 1

It was interesting to find a better solution:

var escapeHTML = function(unsafe) {
  return unsafe.replace(/[&<"']/g, function(m) {
    switch (m) {
      case '&':
        return '&';
      case '<':
        return '<';
      case '"':
        return '"';
      default:
        return ''';
    }
  });
};

I do not parse > because it does not break XML/HTML code in the result.

Here are the benchmarks: http://jsperf.com/regexpairs Also, I created a universal escape function: http://jsperf.com/regexpairs2