We can use Apache's commons-text library to escape the special characters in HTML entities. Before moving further, we will first understand what are special characters and what does escaping of special characters mean.
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What are Special Characters?
Below is the list of special characters:&
>
"
Read Also: Escape Sequences in Java
What does Escaping of Special Characters mean?
Escaping of Special characters means replacing them with HTML character-entities. For example:| Symbol | HTML Entities Name |
& | & |
> | > |
< | |
" | " |
Add Dependency:
Add the below dependency to your pom.xml. The below dependency can be used with Java8+. You can check the latest version here.org.apache.commons
commons-text1.9
We will use StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4() method to escape special characters in String.
Note: Use org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils instead of org.apache.commons.lang3.StringEscapeUtils because later class is deprecated.
Java Program:
Below is the Java Program for escaping special characters in String using commons-text java library.import org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils;
public class JavaHungry {
public static void main(String args[]) {
// Given special character
String testString = " & \" ";
// Escape special character using StringEscapeUtils class
String outputString = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml4(testString);
// Printing the output
System.out.println("Special Characters : "+ testString +"\n Escaped Output : "+outputString);
}
}
Output:
Special Characters : & "
Escaped Output : < > & "
That's all for today, please mention in the comments in case you have any queries regarding escaping special characters in String using the commons-text Java library.
