Fastest method to escape HTML tags as HTML entitie

Question

I'm writing a Chrome extension that involves doing a lot of the following job: sanitizing strings that might contain HTML tags, by converting <, > and & to <, > and &, respectively.

(In other words, the same as PHP's htmlspecialchars(str, ENT_NOQUOTES) – I don't think there's any real need to convert double-quote characters.)

This is the fastest function I have found so far:

function safe_tags(str) {
    return str.replace(/&/g,'&amp;').replace(/</g,'&lt;').replace(/>/g,'&gt;') ;
}

But there's still a big lag when I have to run a few thousand strings through it in one go.

Can anyone improve on this? It's mostly for strings between 10 and 150 characters, if that makes a difference.

(One idea I had was not to bother encoding the greater-than sign – would there be any real danger with that?)

Answer 1

Martijn's method as a prototype function:

String.prototype.escape = function() {
    var tagsToReplace = {
        '&': '&',
        '<': '&lt;',
        '>': '&gt;'
    };
    return this.replace(/[&<>]/g, function(tag) {
        return tagsToReplace[tag] || tag;
    });
};

var a = "<abc>";
var b = a.escape(); // "&lt;abc&gt;"

Answer 2

You could try passing a callback function to perform the replacement:

var tagsToReplace = {
    '&': '&',
    '<': '&lt;',
    '>': '&gt;'
};

function replaceTag(tag) {
    return tagsToReplace[tag] || tag;
}

function safe_tags_replace(str) {
    return str.replace(/[&<>]/g, replaceTag);
}

Here is a performance test: http://jsperf.com/encode-html-entities to compare with calling the replace function repeatedly, and using the DOM method proposed by Dmitrij.

Your way seems to be faster...

Why do you need it, though?

Answer 3

Martijn's method as single function with handling " mark (using in javascript) :

function escapeHTML(html) {
    var fn=function(tag) {
        var charsToReplace = {
            '&': '&',
            '<': '&lt;',
            '>': '&gt;',
            '"': '&#34;'
        };
        return charsToReplace[tag] || tag;
    }
    return html.replace(/[&<>"]/g, fn);
}

Answer 4

The AngularJS source code also has a version inside of angular-sanitize.js.

var SURROGATE_PAIR_REGEXP = /[\uD800-\uDBFF][\uDC00-\uDFFF]/g,
    // Match everything outside of normal chars and " (quote character)
    NON_ALPHANUMERIC_REGEXP = /([^\#-~| |!])/g;
/**
 * Escapes all potentially dangerous characters, so that the
 * resulting string can be safely inserted into attribute or
 * element text.
 * @param value
 * @returns {string} escaped text
 */
function encodeEntities(value) {
  return value.
    replace(/&/g, '&').
    replace(SURROGATE_PAIR_REGEXP, function(value) {
      var hi = value.charCodeAt(0);
      var low = value.charCodeAt(1);
      return '&#' + (((hi - 0xD800) * 0x400) + (low - 0xDC00) + 0x10000) + ';';
    }).
    replace(NON_ALPHANUMERIC_REGEXP, function(value) {
      return '&#' + value.charCodeAt(0) + ';';
    }).
    replace(/</g, '&lt;').
    replace(/>/g, '&gt;');
}

Answer 5

All-in-one script:

// HTML entities Encode/Decode

function htmlspecialchars(str) {
    var map = {
        "&": "&",
        "<": "&lt;",
        ">": "&gt;",
        "\"": "&quot;",
        "'": "&#39;" // ' -> &apos; for XML only
    };
    return str.replace(/[&<>"']/g, function(m) { return map[m]; });
}
function htmlspecialchars_decode(str) {
    var map = {
        "&amp;": "&",
        "&lt;": "<",
        "&gt;": ">",
        "&quot;": "\"",
        "&#39;": "'"
    };
    return str.replace(/(&amp;|&lt;|&gt;|&quot;|&#39;)/g, function(m) { return map[m]; });
}
function htmlentities(str) {
    var textarea = document.createElement("textarea");
    textarea.innerHTML = str;
    return textarea.innerHTML;
}
function htmlentities_decode(str) {
    var textarea = document.createElement("textarea");
    textarea.innerHTML = str;
    return textarea.value;
}

http://pastebin.com/JGCVs0Ts

Answer 6

I'm not entirely sure about speed, but if you are looking for simplicity I would suggest using the lodash/underscore escape function.