Replace characters with HTML entities in Java

Question

I want to replace certain characters with their respective HTML entities in an HTML response inside a filter. Characters include <, >, &. I can't use replaceAll() as it will replace all characters, even those that are part of HTML tags.

What is the best approach for doing so?

Answer 1

From Java you may try Apache Commons Lang (legacy v2) StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(). Or with commons-lang3: StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4().

^{Please note this also converts à to à & such.}