Escape HTML special characters in awk

Question

From an awk script I want to generate a HTML file. My string could include characters like "<" and "&". Is there a short and proven function for awk which does the escaping?

Answer 1

To escape the bare minimum you can do:

function escapeHtml(t)
{
  # Must do this one first
  gsub(/&/, "\\&", t);
  gsub(/"/, "\\"", t)
  gsub(/</, "\\&lt;", t);
  gsub(/>/, "\\&gt;", t);
  return t;
}