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

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);

An alternative to Apache Commons: Use Spring's HtmlUtils.htmlEscape(String input) method.

Nice short method:

public static String escapeHTML(String s) {
    StringBuilder out = new StringBuilder(Math.max(16, s.length()));
    for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
        char c = s.charAt(i);
        if (c > 127 || c == '"' || c == '\'' || c == '<' || c == '>' || c == '&') {
            out.append("&#");
            out.append((int) c);
            out.append(';');
        } else {
            out.append(c);
        }
    }
    return out.toString();
}

Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/8838023/1199155 (the amp is missing there). The four characters checked in the if clause are the only ones below 128, according to http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html