Use JavaScript regex to replace numerical HTML entities with their actual characters

Question

I\'m trying to use JavaScript & regex to replace numerical HTML entities with their actual Unicode characters, e.g.

foo's bar
→
foo\'s bar
         


        

Answer 1

If you don't want to define all the entities you can let the browser do it for you- this bit creates an empty p element, writes the html and returns the text it produces. The p element is never added to the document.

function translateEntities(string){
    var text, p=document.createElement('p');
    p.innerHTML=string;
    text= p.innerText || p.textContent;
    p.innerHTML='';
    return text;
}
var s= 'foo's bar';
translateEntities(s);

/*  returned value: (String)
foo's bar
*/