How Can I Efficiently Encode HTML Tags in JavaScript?

Accelerated Encoding of HTML Tags

When handling user-generated content, it's crucial to sanitize strings that may include HTML tags to prevent malicious injections. Traditionally, this involves replacing specific characters (<, >, &) with their corresponding HTML entities (<, >, &).

Searching for these characters and performing the replacements sequentially can be time-consuming for large datasets. This article explores a more efficient approach to achieve the same result using a novel technique.

An Innovative Solution

The proposed solution utilizes a textarea element in the browser. By setting its textContent property to the input string, the browser automatically converts any HTML tags into their entity equivalents. Subsequently, the .innerHTML property is retrieved to access the sanitized string.

Here's the code snippet:

<code class="js">var escape = document.createElement('textarea');
function escapeHTML(html) {
    escape.textContent = html;
    return escape.innerHTML;
}</code>

For demonstration purposes, here's a simple example:

<code class="js">const html = '<p>This is <b>bold</b> text.</p>';
const encodedHTML = escapeHTML(html);
console.log(encodedHTML); // Output: <p>This is <b>bold</b> text.</p></code>

Additional Considerations

It's important to note that this method does not handle all special characters that need to be encoded for HTML compliance. Additionally, if the input string contains existing HTML entities, they will be double-encoded. Therefore, it's recommended to consider these limitations and make adjustments as necessary based on your specific requirements.

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