HTML: stop rendering HTML code inside div [duplicate]

Question

If i write something like below inside textarea

<strong>test</strong>

inside textarea and then display it inside a div. It shows the text in bold letter instead of showing the html code as it is. So how can i avoid rendering html code. I just want to show as it is the text was entered by user.

Answer 1

You haven't shown us any code, but since you have tagged this jQuery I'll assume you have something like:

$('div').html(
     $('textarea').val()
);

Use the text method instead, so what the user has typed is treated as text instead of HTML.

$('div').text(
     $('textarea').val()
);

See a demonstration.

Answer 2

You need to escape the < and > characters to their HTML entities.

<strong>test</strong>

JSFiddle