Escaping Embedded HTML Tags

Does anyone know of an easy way to escape embedded HTML tags in JavaScript? I am writing a program that deals with user's notes. I need the note content to escape embedded HTML tags like it is done in the title of the note.

this is the code where I set the title and the content of the note:

-for(i=0; i<userNotes.lenght; i++)
li
  div
    b=userNotes[I].title+":"
    -var note_url = "/edit/"+userNotes[i]._id
    a(href=note_url)[edit]
    p!=userNotes[i].contents