Can I escape html special chars in javascript?

Question

I want to display a text to HTML by a javascript function. How can I escape html special chars in JS? Is there an API ?

Answer 1

Came across this issue when building a DOM structure. This question helped me solve it. I wanted to use a double chevron as a path separator, but appending a new text node directly resulted in the escaped character code showing, rather than the character itself:

var _div = document.createElement('div');
var _separator = document.createTextNode('»');
//_div.appendChild(_separator); /* this resulted in '»' being displayed */
_div.innerHTML = _separator.textContent; /* this was key */