Question

I have a Java application that makes heavy use of a large file, to read, process and give through to SolrEmbeddedServer (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/).

One of the functions does basic HTML escaping:

private String htmlEscape(String input)
{
    return input.replace("&", "&amp;").replace(">", "&gt;").replace("<", "&lt;")
        .replace("'", "&apos;").replaceAll("\"", "&quot;");
}

While profiling the application, the program spends roughly 58% of the time in this function, a total of 47% in replace, and 11% in replaceAll.

Now, is the Java replace that slow, or am I on the right path and should I consider the program efficient enough to have its bottleneck in Java and not in my code? (Or am I replacing wrong?)

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

For html escaping you can use StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(input) from commons-lang. It is supposedly implemented in a more efficient way there.