Not sure why this is being downvoted. This "some kind of text/strings" approach is why we have "escaping" functions which turn strings into strings, instead of

Not sure why this is being downvoted. This "some kind of text/strings" approach is why we have "escaping" functions which turn strings into strings, instead of conversion functions from, say, "plain text" to "HTML character data". This prevents our computers from helping us, even if we're using an ivory tower type system with a whizz-bang IDE, since everything's just "String" so the compiler says OK. Here's an example of the alternative http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem.html http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2006-10-18-a-type-based-soluti... (remember that most of the code there is building the libraries; using them is simple and terse).