Convert HTML to Entities Using JavaScript Function htmlentities() is a PHP function which converts special characters (like <) into their escaped/encoded values (like <). This allows you to show to display the string without the browser reading it as HTML. JavaScript doesn’t have a native version of it. If you just need the very basics to so that the browser won’t interpret as HTML, this should work fine (via James Padolsey and I got a a similar idea from David Walsh). function htmlEntities(str) { return String(str).replace(/&/g, '&').replace(/</g, '<').replace(/>/g, '>').replace(/"/g, '"'); } The PHP.js project , which is a project to port over all of PHP’s native functions to JavaScript, contains an example as well. I tried it and it works, but I’ve been warned much of the code from that project is poorly written, so I’ve kept it simple and used the above. Download