Escaping special characters in Java replace & > < \

i'm doing part in ETA system, which is a Webservice...
So it was needed to replcae some characters form XML data.

We have done this before sevaral time inside some methods...

But this time as the best practice i write a simple method to
do this...

hope it might useful to you:

Character	Reference
&	&
<	&lt;
>	&gt;
"	&quot;
'	&apos;

import java.text.CharacterIterator;

import java.text.StringCharacterIterator;

public class EscapeCharacter {

  

  public static void main(String[] args) {

        String str = "sdas\\d\\asa-&-adas-&-das-<-da->-sa";

        System.out.println(str);

      

        

        System.out.println(forXML(str));

    }

    public static String forXML(String aText) {

        aText = aText.replaceAll("&(?!amp;)", "&");

        final StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();

        final StringCharacterIterator iterator =  new StringCharacterIterator(aText);

        char character = iterator.current();

        while (character != CharacterIterator.DONE) {

            if (character == '<') {

                result.append("<");

            } else if (character == '>') {

                result.append(">");

            } else if (character == '\"') {

                result.append(""");

            } else if (character == '\'') {

                result.append("'");

            } else {

                //the char is not a special one

                //add it to the result as is

                result.append(character);

            }

            character = iterator.next();

        }

        

        return result.toString();

    }

}