How to insert HTML as Text

Question

I want HTML, for example,

, to show show as just that, in plain text, and not interpreted by the browser as an actual tag.

I know JQuery has .h

Answer 1

This is a job for the method createTextNode

var target div = document.getElementById('div1');
targetDiv.appendChild(document.createTextNode('<p>HelloWorld</p>'));

Answer 2

There's no need to escape the characters. Simply use createTextNode:

var text = document.createTextNode('<p>Stuff</p>');
document.body.appendChild(text);

See a working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/tZ3Xj/.

This is exactly how jQuery does it (line 43 of jQuery 1.5.2):

return this.empty().append( (this[0] && this[0].ownerDocument || document).createTextNode( text ) );

Answer 3

The function used by Prototype looks like a good start:

http://www.prototypejs.org/api/string/escapeHTML

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

Version more suited to use outside Prototype:

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

Answer 4

i suggest to use pre tag of html

and you can convert your using this link

e.g if you copy

<p>Hi </p>

it will give you converted code as...

<p>Hi </p>

Just copy and paste above code in pre and it will work fine...

Answer 5

You can use aslo innerText from most of DOM elements:

document.getElementById('some').innerText = "There can be <b> even HTML tags </b>";

The tags will not be formatted. You can aslo use \n for new line and more codes (\t, \u2623...). If you want aslo to use fixed-size characters you can use easy <pre> tag.