What is the best way to escape HTML-specific characters in a string (PowerShell)?

Question

I\'m generating some simple HTML with PowerShell script, and I would like to escape strings used in result HTML (since they can contain some HTML-specific symbols).

Answer 1

Starting with PowerShell 3.0, use [System.Net.WebUtility] for any of the four common operations:

[System.Net.WebUtility]::HtmlEncode('something ')
[System.Net.WebUtility]::HtmlDecode('something <somthing else>')
[System.Net.WebUtility]::UrlEncode('something ')
[System.Net.WebUtility]::UrlDecode('something+%3Csomthing+else%3E')

[System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode is the common approach previous to .NET 4.0 (PowerShell 2.0 or earlier), but would require loading System.Web.dll:

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Web

Starting with .NET 4.0 (PowerShell 3.0) [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEnocde internally calls [System.Net.WebUtility]::HtmlEncode, therefore it makes sense to leave out the middle man (System.Web.dll).