Java one-liner: XML text escapes

It never occured to me before today but

str.replaceAll("&","&amp;").replaceAll("<","&lt;").replaceAll(">","&gt;");

is good enough for quick and dirty escaping of XML text.

And escaping it manually to write it here is also fun ;-)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to Java one-liner: XML text escapes

  1. Santiago Gala says:
    May 16, 2007 at 12:03 am

    IIRC, the “>” is not really needed. The corresponding python idiom is:

    >>> str='<em>AT&T</em>’
    >>> ‘&lt;’.join(‘&amp;’.join(str.split(‘&’)).split(‘<‘))
    &lt;em>AT&amp;T&lt;/em>’

  2. Henri Yandell says:
    May 16, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    If Lang is in your classpath:

    http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/lang/api-release/org/apache/commons/lang/StringEscapeUtils.html#escapeXml(java.lang.String)

  3. Yonik Seeley says:
    May 16, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    Since ]]> is not legal, it’s often easiest to just escape all ‘>’.

    And unfortunately, while this is good enough to escape all “text”, it’s not good enough to escape all Java Strings, or all of unicode (some of the lower control chars are not valid XML, even if replaced by a numeric entity).

  4. panzi says:
    July 3, 2010 at 9:35 pm

    from xml.sax.saxutils import quoteattr, escape

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