JSX Recipes: How to render HTML in React

Join the AI Workshop to learn more about AI and how it can be applied to web development. Next cohort February 1st, 2026

The AI-first Web Development BOOTCAMP cohort starts February 24th, 2026. 10 weeks of intensive training and hands-on projects.


I had this problem - I needed to add an HTML string in a React application, coming from a WYSIWYG editor, but simply adding {myString} to the JSX was escaping the HTML.. so the HTML tags were displayed to the user!

How did I solve it? I saw 2 solutions, basically. The first native, the second required a library.

First solution: use dangerouslySetInnerHTML

You can use the dangerouslySetInnerHTML attribute on an HTML element to add an HTML string inside its content:

<div
  dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
    __html: props.house.description
  }}></div>

Remember that it’s called dangerously for a reason. HTML is not escaped at all in this case, and it might cause XSS issues.

But there are good use cases for this.

Second solution: use a 3rd party library

There are many libraries that implement the functionality that dangerouslySetInnerHTML provides, in a simpler way.

One of them is the react-html-parser library.

See the library on GitHub: https://github.com/wrakky/react-html-parser

Warning: at the time of writing, it’s not been updated in the last 2 years, so things might break in the future. It worked for me.

Which one to use?

You can look for other similar libraries, but in the end I chose to use the dangerouslySetInnerHTML way.

This dangerously-looking name was a built-in reminder to pay attention at correctly whitelisting the HTML tags I allowed the user to enter to that HTML string.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: ▶︎ How to render HTML in React
2: Conditional rendering in React
3: How to loop inside React JSX
4: React, how to make responsive JSX
5: How to repeat displaying something in JSX
6: How to move around blocks of code with React and Tailwind