How to insert HTML as Text

I want HTML, for example, <p>, to show show as just that, in plain text, and not interpreted by the browser as an actual tag.

I know JQuery has .html and .text, but how is this done in raw JS?

There are functions like encodeURIComponent that encodes <p> to %3Cp%3E but if I just put that into HTML, it interprets it literally as %3Cp%3E.

So there are also things like > and <, they work but I can't find any JavaScript functions that escapes & unescapes from this.

Is there a correct way to show HTML as text with raw JavaScript?

Solution 1:

There's no need to escape the characters. Simply use createTextNode:

var text = document.createTextNode('<p>Stuff</p>');
document.body.appendChild(text);

See a working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/tZ3Xj/.

This is exactly how jQuery does it (line 43 of jQuery 1.5.2):

return this.empty().append( (this[0] && this[0].ownerDocument || document).createTextNode( text ) );

Solution 2:

The function used by Prototype looks like a good start:

http://www.prototypejs.org/api/string/escapeHTML

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

Version more suited to use outside Prototype:

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

Solution 3:

You can use aslo innerText from most of DOM elements:

document.getElementById('some').innerText = "There can be <b> even HTML tags </b>";

The tags will not be formatted. You can aslo use \n for new line and more codes (\t, \u2623...). If you want aslo to use fixed-size characters you can use easy <pre> tag.