Escaping HTML special character with JSP or JQuery

Question

My JSP file contains a table with the following row:

<td class="description" id="${doc.id}"></td>

I want it to be empty at first, as above. Later, after the page is loaded and some logic is processed, I want to fill it asynchronously with a content using JQuery .html method:

$("#${doc.id}").html("${doc.description}");

For regular user inputs everything works fine, but error occurs, when a user enters special character: "

How can I prevent application from reading that character as special, and have the application running correctly?

I have tried to use JSP escape functions like this:

$("#${doc.id}").html("${fn:escapeXml(doc.description)}");

And this:

$("#${doc.id}").html("<c:out value="${doc.description}"/>");

And neither first nor second worked. Why?

Answer 1

Here is one way - seeing you already have the data on the page

<td class="description hide" id="${doc.id}"><c:out value="${doc.description}"/></td>

where

.hide is {display:none}

and then

$("#${doc.id}").show();