Fastest method to escape HTML tags as HTML entities?

Question

I\'m writing a Chrome extension that involves doing a lot of the following job: sanitizing strings that might contain HTML tags, by converting

Answer 1

Here's one way you can do this:

var escape = document.createElement('textarea');
function escapeHTML(html) {
    escape.textContent = html;
    return escape.innerHTML;
}

function unescapeHTML(html) {
    escape.innerHTML = html;
    return escape.textContent;
}

Here's a demo.