What is the recommended way to escape HTML symbols in plain Java?

Question

Is there a recommended way to escape <, >, " and & characters when outputting HTML in plain Java code? (Other than manually doing the following, that is).

String source = "The less than sign (<) and ampersand (&) must be escaped before using them in HTML"; String escaped = source.replace("<", "&lt;").replace("&", "&amp;"); // ... 

Answer 1

StringEscapeUtils from Apache Commons Lang:

import static org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml; // ... String source = "The less than sign (<) and ampersand (&) must be escaped before using them in HTML"; String escaped = escapeHtml(source); 

For version 3:

import static org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4; // ... String escaped = escapeHtml4(source);