dangerouslySetInnerHTML is React’s replacement for using innerHTML in the browser DOM. In general, setting HTML from code is risky because it’s easy to inadvertently expose your users to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack.

It is better/safer to sanitise your raw HTML (using e.g., DOMPurify) before injecting it into the DOM via dangerouslySetInnerHTML.

DOMPurify - a DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG. DOMPurify works with a secure default, but offers a lot of configurability and hooks.

Example:

import React from 'react'
import createDOMPurify from 'dompurify'
import { JSDOM } from 'jsdom'

const window = (new JSDOM('')).window
const DOMPurify = createDOMPurify(window)

const rawHTML = `
<div class="dropdown">
  <button class="btn btn-default dropdown-toggle" type="button" id="dropdownMenu1" data-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="true">
    Dropdown
    <span class="caret"></span>
  </button>
  <ul class="dropdown-menu" role="menu" aria-labelledby="dropdownMenu1">
    <li role="presentation"><a role="menuitem" tabindex="-1" href="#">Action</a></li>
    <li role="presentation"><a role="menuitem" tabindex="-1" href="#">Another action</a></li>
    <li role="presentation"><a role="menuitem" tabindex="-1" href="#">Something else here</a></li>
    <li role="presentation"><a role="menuitem" tabindex="-1" href="#">Separated link</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>
`

const YourComponent = () => (
  <div>
    { <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: DOMPurify.sanitize(rawHTML) }} /> }
  </div>
)

export default YourComponent

Note that dangerouslySetInnerHTML can be dangerous if you do not know what is in the HTML string you are injecting. This is because malicious client side code can be injected via script tags.

It is probably a good idea to sanitize the HTML string via a utility such as DOMPurify if you are not 100% sure the HTML you are rendering is XSS (cross-site scripting) safe.

Example:

import DOMPurify from 'dompurify'

const thisIsMyCopy = '<p>copy copy copy <strong>strong copy</strong></p>';


render: function() {
    return (
        <div className="content" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: DOMPurify.sanitize(thisIsMyCopy)}}></div>
    );
}