I have a localStorage holding a string that looks like the follows:
"ABC&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;&nbps;ABC Description"
I get this string from the localStorage and I need to set the value of this string into an Option of a drop-down control, replacing the no-break space entity with empty spaces (in order to align with other options).
In the code behind of ASP.NET I would use HttpUtility.HtmlDecode. But how do you decode this string in the javascript?
You can use the following bit of code to convert HTML to text (using just javascript)
var span = document.createElement("SPAN");
span.innerHTML = "ABC ABC Description";
alert(span.innerText);
It creates a dummy element, sets its HTML to your HTML and extracts the text.
Note that it should be nbsp (non-breaking space) and not nbps
That said, the way you are doing this suggests that you are allowing the user to enter arbitrary HTML. This is not a good idea in terms of security (a user could put in malicious HTML into this field).
This was answered before here. But it's not &nbps;. To decode wrong markup with &nbps; on it, you will have to do a manual replace: whatever.replace('&nbps;', ' ');
It's safer to strip script tags instead of having the browser parse the raw HTML. That will prevent malicious code from being executed...
var decodeEntities = (function() {
// this prevents any overhead from creating the object each time
var element = document.createElement('div');
function decodeHTMLEntities (str) {
if(str && typeof str === 'string') {
// strip script/html tags
str = str.replace(/<script[^>]*>([\S\s]*?)<\/script>/gmi, '');
str = str.replace(/<\/?\w(?:[^"'>]|"[^"]*"|'[^']*')*>/gmi, '');
element.innerHTML = str;
str = element.textContent;
element.textContent = '';
}
return str;
}
return decodeHTMLEntities;
})();
If you are using Jquery on the client side use this to convert into html.
theHtml = $.parseHTML( "ABC ABC Description" );
