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

Martijn's method as a prototype function:

String.prototype.escape = function() {
    var tagsToReplace = {
        '&': '&',
        '<': '<',
        '>': '>'
    };
    return this.replace(/[&<>]/g, function(tag) {
        return tagsToReplace[tag] || tag;
    });
};

var a = "";
var b = a.escape(); // "<abc>"