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I'm working in a system where there is no document and no jQuery, but I do have to present html entities in an understandable way. So the trick of putting the string in an element and then taking the .text() won't work.

I need a pure JavaScript solution. The system isn't reachable from the outside, there is no user-input so security is not really an issue.

Thanks for any help, I'm out of ideas (not that I had to many to begin with)...

Perhaps I should clarify, what I am looking for is a function (or pointers to get me pointing in the right direction) which is able to translate a string with substrings that should translate to characters. So it should be able to translate "blah &#60; blahblah" into "blah < blahblah". There are no additional frameworks I can use other than pure javascript.

UPDATE:

I've got the html4 part working, not extremely difficult, but I have been busy with other things. Here's the fiddle:html4 entities to characters. You could have done the same with a dictionary with just the characters already in there, but I didn't feel like making such a dictionary. The function is fairly simple but I guess it could do with some refactoring, can't really be bothered at the moment...

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  • can you show what you have so far Commented Apr 7, 2015 at 8:38
  • This answer has the start of a solution, though it mentions you'll need a hashmap of non-numeric entities to deal with those. Commented Apr 7, 2015 at 8:38
  • Yes @JamesThorpe I found that soludion, but most entities I have to deal with are entities like &euml;, so then I would have to construct a dictionary with all the possible entities, which is an option but I was hoping/looking for an more elegant solution. Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 10:26
  • It would seem that node html entities github has files (html5-entities) which make the creation of a suitable dictionary much easier. It will be a beast of a dictionary if I want to include all the html5 entities though. But I think I will be able to get a working function... Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 12:00

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This function exists in PHP (htmlspecialchars_decode). As such, you'll find a javascript port from PHPJS. This is based on a very established codebase, and should be better than rolling something on your own.

Edit / Add: Flub on my part. I didn't read the entities part properly. You want the equiv of html_entity_decode:

http://phpjs.org/functions/html_entity_decode/

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Assuming you are using nodejs, cheerio is exactly what you need. I have used it myself a couple of times with great success for off-browser testing of HTML structures returned from servers.

https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio

The most awesome part is that it uses jQuery API.

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I see... Then your best chance is probably to have a look at this module and just use their approach. There are two arrays in lib/html-entities.js which are exactly what you need, you can build a dictionary from there and use the replace() method on strings.

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