How to escape double quotes in a title attribute

Question

This variant -

<a title="Some &quot;text&quot;">Hover me</a>

Is correct and it works as expected - you see normal quotes in rendered page.

Here's a snippet of the HTML escape characters taken from a cached page on archive.org:

&#060   |   <   less than sign
&#064   |   @   at sign
&#093   |   ]   right bracket
&#123   |   {   left curly brace
&#125   |   }   right curly brace
&#133   |   …   ellipsis
&#135   |   ‡   double dagger
&#146   |   ’   right single quote
&#148   |   ”   right double quote
&#150   |   –   short dash
&#153   |   ™   trademark
&#162   |   ¢   cent sign
&#165   |   ¥   yen sign
&#169   |   ©   copyright sign
&#172   |   ¬   logical not sign
&#176   |   °   degree sign
&#178   |   ²   superscript 2
&#185   |   ¹   superscript 1
&#188   |   ¼   fraction 1/4
&#190   |   ¾   fraction 3/4
&#247   |   ÷   division sign
&#8221  |   ”   right double quote
&#062   |   >   greater than sign
&#091   |   [   left bracket
&#096   |   `   back apostrophe
&#124   |   |   vertical bar
&#126   |   ~   tilde
&#134   |   †   dagger
&#145   |   ‘   left single quote
&#147   |   “   left double quote
&#149   |   •   bullet
&#151   |   —   longer dash
&#161   |   ¡   inverted exclamation point
&#163   |   £   pound sign
&#166   |   ¦   broken vertical bar
&#171   |   «   double left than sign
&#174   |   ®   registered trademark sign
&#177   |   ±   plus or minus sign
&#179   |   ³   superscript 3
&#187   |   »   double greater-than sign
&#189   |   ½   fraction 1/2
&#191   |   ¿   inverted question mark
&#8220  |   “   left double quote
&#8212  |   —   dash

The escape code " can also be used instead of ".

Using " is the way to do it. I tried your second code snippet, and it works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

It may work with any character from the HTML Escape character list, but I had the same problem with a Java project. I used StringEscapeUtils.escapeHTML("Testing \" <br> <p>") and the title was <a href=".." title="Test&quot; &lt;br&gt; &lt;p&gt;">Testing</a>.

It only worked for me when I changed the StringEscapeUtils to StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavascript("Testing \" <br> <p>") and it worked in every browser.