html - What is the difference between escapeXml and escapeHtml?

Question

I would like to escape characters in JSP pages. Which is more suitable, escapeXml or escapeHtml?

Answer 1

They're designed for different purposes, HTML has lots of entities that XML doesn't. XML only has 5 escapes:

&lt; represents "<"
&gt; represents ">"
&amp; represents "&"
&apos; represents '
&quot; represents "

While HTML has loads - think of   © etc. These HTML codes aren't valid in XML unless you include a definition in the header. The numeric codes (like © for the copyright symbol) are valid in both.