def escape(s):
    """Replace special characters "&", "<", ">" and (") to HTML-safe sequences.

    There is a special handling for `None` which escapes to an empty string.

    .. versionchanged:: 0.9
       `quote` is now implicitly on.

    :param s: the string to escape.
    :param quote: ignored.
    """
    if s is None:
        return ""
    elif hasattr(s, "__html__"):
        return text_type(s.__html__())

    if not isinstance(s, string_types):
        s = text_type(s)

    return (
        s.replace("&", "&amp;")
        .replace("<", "&lt;")
        .replace(">", "&gt;")
        .replace('"', "&quot;")
    )