Fastest method to escape HTML tags as HTML entities?

Question

I\'m writing a Chrome extension that involves doing a lot of the following job: sanitizing strings that might contain HTML tags, by converting

Answer 1

You could try passing a callback function to perform the replacement:

var tagsToReplace = {
    '&': '&',
    '<': '<',
    '>': '>'
};

function replaceTag(tag) {
    return tagsToReplace[tag] || tag;
}

function safe_tags_replace(str) {
    return str.replace(/[&<>]/g, replaceTag);
}

Here is a performance test: http://jsperf.com/encode-html-entities to compare with calling the replace function repeatedly, and using the DOM method proposed by Dmitrij.

Your way seems to be faster...

Why do you need it, though?