Question

100

How to insert HTML as Text

rated 0 times [ 103] [ 3] / answers: 1 / hits: 25413 / 13 Years ago, mon, april 11, 2011, 12:00:00

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?

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elainaw

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1 Year ago

answered 13 Years ago jarod · Accepted Answer

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 ) );