Talk:How to perform HTML entity encoding in Java

Status
Released Stephendv 09:51, 14 January 2008 (EST)

Reviewers

 * Dave Read

General Discussion
The Apache Jakarta Commons Lang package (as of version 2.2) contains a StringEscapeUtils class that contains this functionality. See the escapeHtml(String) method. The documentation states:

Escapes the characters in a String using HTML entities.

Supports all known HTML 4.0 entities, including funky accents. Note that the commonly used apostrophe escape character (&apos;) is not a legal entity and so is not supported).

Why go to all the trouble of computing int len and running the for loop if the input String is null? I suggest adding a sanity check to the top of the method:

if (s == null) return "";