Encoding and Decoding HTML characters

Hi all,

I need to encode and decode HTML characters within a text String. For example, I need to convert:

to...

...and vice versa. Is there a class or package that handles these conversions?

PS - I'm NOT using the string conversion URLs, so I don't need the java.net.URLEncoder/URLDecoder classes.
[ May 03, 2007: Message edited by: Kevin Weisz ]

In JavaScript or on the server? I suspect the latter so I'm moving this to the Servlets forum.

It would be on the server. We cannot use Javascript in our case.

Originally posted by Kevin Weisz:
so I don't need the java.net.URLEncoder/URLDecoder classes.

Those wouldn't help you anyways; URL encoding and HTML Entity encoding are completely separate things.

There is no built-in encoder/decoder for HTML entitites. You'll either need to write your own or find a 3rd party implementation.

Depending upon how detailed you want to get (do you want to support all entitites, or just the critical ones like &, < and >) it can be as simple as a few calls to String.replaceAll().
[ May 03, 2007: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

At the moment, just the critical one like those you mentioned.
[ May 03, 2007: Message edited by: Kevin Weisz ]

Then a simple class with methods that encode/decode through text substitution should be easy to whip up.

P.S. For emission onto a JSP page, <c

ut> will do this auto-matically.