public static String colorToString(Color color) 
{
        if (color == null) {
            return "";
        }
        StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
        buf.append('#");
        buf.append(numberToPaddedHexString(color.getRed(), 2));
        buf.append(numberToPaddedHexString(color.getGreen(), 2));
        buf.append(numberToPaddedHexString(color.getBlue(), 2));
        return buf.toString();
}

Return a string representation of a color

 public static String encodeHTML(String html) 
{
        // Does java have a method of doing this?
        StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
        char ch;
        for (int i = 0; i <  html.length(); i++) {
            ch = html.charAt(i);
            switch (ch) {
            case '&":
                //	May be already encoded
                if (((i + 5) <  html.length()) &&
                        html.substring(i + 1, i + 5).equals("amp;")) {
                    buf.append(ch);
                } else {
                    buf.append("&");
                }
                break;
            case '"":
                buf.append(""");
                break;
            case '< ":
                buf.append("<");
                break;
            case ' >":
                buf.append(">");
                break;
            default:
                buf.append(ch);
            }
        }
        return buf.toString();
}

This method will replace '&' with "&", '"' with """, '<' with "<" and '>' with ">".

 public static String numberToPaddedHexString(int number,
    int size) 
{
        String s = Integer.toHexString(number);
        if (s.length()  > size) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException(
                "Number too big for padded hex string");
        }
        StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();
        for (int i = 0; i <  (size - s.length()); i++) {
            buf.append('0");
        }
        buf.append(s);
        return buf.toString();
}

Convert a number to a zero padded hex string

 public static Color stringToColor(String s) 
{
        try {
            return new Color(Integer.decode("0x" + s.substring(1, 3)).intValue(),
                Integer.decode("0x" + s.substring(3, 5)).intValue(),
                Integer.decode("0x" + s.substring(5, 7)).intValue());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return null;
        }
}

Return a Color object given a string representation of it