Escape string for use in HTML

This module exports a single function, escapeHtml, that is used to escape a string of content such that it can be interpolated in HTML content.

This is a Node.js module available through the npm registry. Installation is done using the npm install command:

$ npm install escape-html

Escape special characters in the given string of text, such that it can be interpolated in HTML content.

This function will escape the following characters: ", ', &, <, and >.

Note that the escaped value is only suitable for being interpolated into HTML as the text content of elements in which the tag does not have different escaping mechanisms (it cannot be placed inside <style> or <script>, for example, as those content bodies are not HTML, but CSS and JavaScript, respectively; these are known as "raw text elements" in the HTML standard).

Note when using the escaped value within a tag, it is only suitable as the value of an attribute, where the value is quoted with either a double quote character (") or a single quote character (').

The escapeHtml function is designed to accept a string input of text and return an escaped value to interpolate into HTML.

var escapeHtml = require('escape-html')
// example values
var desc = 'I <b>think</b> this is good.'
var fullName = 'John "Johnny" Smith'
// example passing in text into a html attribute
console.dir('<input name="full_name" value="' + escapeHtml(fullName) + '">')
// -> '<input name="full_name" value="John &quot;Johnny&quot; Smith">'
// example passing in text in html body
console.dir('<textarea name="desc">' + escapeHtml(desc) + '</textarea>')
// -> '<textarea name="desc">I &lt;b&gt;think&lt;/b&gt; this is good.</textarea>'

$ npm run-script bench
> escape-html@1.0.3 bench nodejs-escape-html
> node benchmark/index.js
  http_parser@1.0
  node@0.10.33
  v8@3.14.5.9
  ares@1.9.0-DEV
  uv@0.10.29
  zlib@1.2.3
  modules@11
  openssl@1.0.1j
  1 test completed.
  2 tests completed.
  3 tests completed.
  no special characters    x 19,435,271 ops/sec ±0.85% (187 runs sampled)
  single special character x  6,132,421 ops/sec ±0.67% (194 runs sampled)
  many special characters  x  3,175,826 ops/sec ±0.65% (193 runs sampled)

MIT