How to escape apostrophe or quotes on a JSP (used by JavaScript)

Use the Apache StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript function.

Escapes the characters in a String using JavaScript String rules.

Escapes any values it finds into their JavaScript String form.
Deals correctly with quotes and control-chars (tab, backslash, cr, ff, etc.)

So a tab becomes the characters '\\' and 't'.

fn:escapeXml does not work in JavaScript. It replaces ' with #&0039; still causing an error when the JavaScript is executed.

Only escaping in the JavaScript manner is correct: \'

The Apache StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript function does this for you. Creating a taglib for it greatly simplifies matters.

I prefer to avoid scriptlets in the middle of my page and was having to use them (increasingly often) to escape strings when used in JavaScript code. I wanted an Expression Language (EL) way of escaping the strings. I created a very small custom taglib that I use for just this purpose:

Utilities.java:

package com.mycom.taglibs;

import org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils;

public class Utilities {
    public static String escapeJS(String value) {
        return StringEscapeUtils.escapeJavaScript(value);
    }
}

mytaglib.tld:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<taglib xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-jsptaglibrary_2_0.xsd"
version="2.0">

  <description>My Tag Library</description>
  <display-name>Tag Utils</display-name>
  <tlib-version>1.1</tlib-version>
  <short-name>myt</short-name>

  <function>
    <description>
        JavaScript Escape function
    </description>
    <name>escapeJS</name>
    <function-class>com.mycom.taglibs.Utilities</function-class>
    <function-signature>java.lang.String escapeJS(java.lang.String)</function-signature>
  </function>
</taglib>

And, in the JSP page:

<%@ taglib prefix="myt" uri="/WEB-INF/mytaglib.tld" %>
The escaped string is: ${myt:escapeJS(variableHoldingTheString)}