"Unescape" HTML chars?

Question

HEllo guys.

While playing with the syndication api, I've noticed that I'm getting escaped chars in it when I put the text inside a textbox. For instance, I'm editing a feed and I've noticed that the title is replacing spaces with  . Is there any way to "unescape" this without me having to write my own routine?

thanks,

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Luis Abreu

Answer 1

Have you tried the javascript unescape function?

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_unescape.asp

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Dave Paquette @Dave_Paquette www.davepaquette.com

Answer 2

It won't work. If I recall correctly, the solution is to build a parsing routine that does that, but I was hoping that this was already part of the WinJS library.

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Luis Abreu

Answer 3

Ah...I see the difference now.  I am not aware of any built in functions in WinJS.  Some people are using a little jQuery hack which may work if you are already using jQuery.

function htmlDecode(value){ 
  return $('<div/>').html(value).text(); 
}

otherwise a straight DOM version of the same thing:

function htmlDecode(input){
  var e = document.createElement('div');
  e.innerHTML = input;
  return e.childNodes.length === 0 ? "" : e.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
}

You still need to write your own method, but at least you're not parsing the text directly.

Code snippets take from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1912501/unescape-html-entities-in-javascript

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Dave Paquette @Dave_Paquette www.davepaquette.com

Answer 4

Thanks Dave.

I really did expect there to be some sort of builtin helper...oh well :)

thanks again.

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Luis Abreu