In Java How to Escape HTML content? Simple Tutorial using Apache Commons Library

Sometime it’s absolutely necessary to escape HTML content before you proceed over to Database operations or sending it as a POST call payload.

Sometime back I’ve written a tutorial on Escape Character Utility for URL and JSON data – Kindly visit below tutorial for the same.

Escape Character Utility for URL and JSON data – Feel free to use in your Java Project

Do you have any of below questions?

• A method to escape HTML tags as HTML entities.
• Escapes and unescapes Strings for Java, Java Script, HTML and XML.
• How to escape HTML Special characters in JSP and Java?
• StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4() tutorial.

If yes, then you are at right place.

First thing first:

• Add pom.xml dependency:

       <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-text</artifactId>
            <version>1.9</version>
        </dependency>

Let’s get started:

• Create class CrunchifyEscapeHTMLTutorial,java
• Copy and paste below code into it.

package crunchify.com.java.tutorials;

import org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils;

/**
 * @author Crunchify.com
 * Program: In Java How to Escape HTML? Simple Tutorial using Apache Commons Library.
 */

public class CrunchifyEscapeHTMLTutorial {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        // StringEscapeUtils: Escapes and unescapes Strings for Java, Java Script, HTML and XML.
        // #ThreadSafe#
        // This code has been adapted from Apache Commons Lang 3.5.

        String crunchifyHTML = "<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n" +
                "<p>My name is <strong>App Shah</strong> and I’m a founder of <em><strong>Crunchify, LLC</strong></em>.</p>\n" +
                "<!-- /wp:paragraph -->\n" +
                "\n" +
                "<!-- wp:paragraph -->\n" +
                "<p>I started my blogging in <strong>2012</strong> as a hobby and now working as a <strong>full-time</strong> employee.<br>Our site is most popular among <code>bloggers</code> who are ready to learn the tricks of the trade to turning a blog into a successful <em>Tech Professionals</em> and <em>Niche Bloggers</em>.</p>\n" +
                "<!-- /wp:paragraph -->";

        // escapeHtml4: Escapes the characters in a String using HTML entities.
        // For example:
        // "bread" &amp; "butter"
        // becomes: &amp;quot;bread&amp;quot; &amp;amp; &amp;quot;butter&amp;quot;.

        // 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).
        String crunchifyResult = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4(crunchifyHTML);

        crunchifyPrintUtils(crunchifyResult);

    }

    private static void crunchifyPrintUtils(String crunchifyResult) {
        System.out.println(crunchifyResult);
    }
}

IntelliJ IDEA console result:

Run above program as a Java Application and you will result as below. Here of the HTML tags are converted to it’s ASCII characters.

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>My name is <strong>App Shah</strong> and I’m a founder of <em><strong>Crunchify, LLC</strong></em>.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:paragraph -->
<p>I started my blogging in <strong>2012</strong> as a hobby and now working as a <strong>full-time</strong> employee.<br>Our site is most popular among <code>bloggers</code> who are ready to learn the tricks of the trade to turning a blog into a successful <em>Tech Professionals</em> and <em>Niche Bloggers</em>.</p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

Process finished with exit code 0

Let me know if you face any issue running above java program.