Escaping content for placement with jQuery's .html() function

I need to accept arbitrary user input. Later, I want to copy that input, already escaped to HTML entities, into a textarea so it can be edited. However, jQuery's jQuery.html() function reads out the HTML entities as if they were real HTML and injects the user script directly into the page. I need to grab the contents of the user input, even if it contains <script> tags, and output to a textarea where it can be edited.

So, I need this:

<textarea name="empty"></textarea>
<div name="user-input"> &lt;script&gt; window.alert('hi'); &lt;/script&gt; </div>

to become this:

<textarea name="empty"> &lt;script&gt; window.alert('hi'); &lt;/script&gt; </textarea>
<div name="user-input"> &lt;script&gt; window.alert('hi'); &lt;/script&gt; </div>

on JavaScript trigger. Instead, the textarea becomes:

<textarea name="empty"> <script> window.alert('hi'); </script> </textarea>

displaying an empty text box and injecting the user's JavaScript into the page.

Right now I am getting the contents of user-input and placing them into the textarea like so:

 $('#edit-textarea').html(($('#user-input').开发者_StackOverflow社区text()));

I've tried several variations of this to no avail.

Please see http://jsfiddle.net/vkRkt/8 for a test case.

EDIT:

See discussion below. The solution in my case was to use jquery.val() instead of jquery.html(). I skipped over val because I was under the impression that it was an alias for jquery.attr('value', new_value), which has its own injection issues (can be stopped with a "). val() is not the same as attr('value', val) and appears safe from injection attempts in my brief testing.

If anyone runs across this later and knows that val is actually not a safe way to do this, please answer and update us immediately.

Thanks.

$('#edit-textarea').val(($('#user-input').text()));

works fine for me. I also tried using .text() instead of .val() and it of course kept the escaping as well. Don't use .html() if you don't want the data to be HTML.

jsFiddle Demo