Can use the following:-
tringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(). Looks like it works for both h:outputText with escape="false" AND the mobi:dataViewColumn value attribute.

bodyForView = StringUtils.replace(StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(body), "\n", "<br>");

r45043: added 'escape' attribute to mobi:dataViewColumn.

There are still a few points that need to be decided/modified:
1) Before this fix, it was already possible to include HTML tags in the column value by default, they were rendered "as is", meaning that all HTML tags were just passed through and became part of the markup, instead of treating them as text (as if to show some markup examples, etc.). So, the new escape attribute is 'false' by default, in order to preserve the old behaviour. However, in h:outputText, the default is 'true'.
2) Because mobi:dataViewColumn uses a model object (interface), it was necessary to add to it a method corresponding to the escape attribute. This means that applications currently using a custom DataViewColumnsModel will need to be modified to include this method. An option would be to turn the interface into an abstract class with this new method (isEscape()) defined by default.

This is actually meant for the value itself, not for the header and footer text. Although, we'll double check if the customer wants that as well.

Re-open for 3.3 maintenance backport.

Let's make the default for 4.1 to be true, so it's aligned with the other JSF components.

r45085: committed improvement to the icemobile project.

r45086: changed default value of 'escape' attribute to true (in 4.1).