Unescape HTML entities in JavaScript?

Solution 1:

Most answers given here have a huge disadvantage: if the string you are trying to convert isn't trusted then you will end up with a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability. For the function in the accepted answer, consider the following:

htmlDecode("<img src='dummy' onerror='alert(/xss/)'>");

The string here contains an unescaped HTML tag, so instead of decoding anything the htmlDecode function will actually run JavaScript code specified inside the string.

This can be avoided by using DOMParser which is supported in all modern browsers:

function htmlDecode(input) {
  var doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(input, "text/html");
  return doc.documentElement.textContent;
}

console.log(  htmlDecode("&lt;img src='myimage.jpg'&gt;")  )    
// "<img src='myimage.jpg'>"

console.log(  htmlDecode("<img src='dummy' onerror='alert(/xss/)'>")  )  
// ""

This function is guaranteed to not run any JavaScript code as a side-effect. Any HTML tags will be ignored, only text content will be returned.

Compatibility note: Parsing HTML with DOMParser requires at least Chrome 30, Firefox 12, Opera 17, Internet Explorer 10, Safari 7.1 or Microsoft Edge. So all browsers without support are way past their EOL and as of 2017 the only ones that can still be seen in the wild occasionally are older Internet Explorer and Safari versions (usually these still aren't numerous enough to bother).

Solution 2:

Do you need to decode all encoded HTML entities or just & itself?

If you only need to handle & then you can do this:

var decoded = encoded.replace(/&amp;/g, '&');

If you need to decode all HTML entities then you can do it without jQuery:

var elem = document.createElement('textarea');
elem.innerHTML = encoded;
var decoded = elem.value;

Please take note of Mark's comments below which highlight security holes in an earlier version of this answer and recommend using textarea rather than div to mitigate against potential XSS vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities exist whether you use jQuery or plain JavaScript.

Solution 3:

EDIT: You should use the DOMParser API as Wladimir suggests, I edited my previous answer since the function posted introduced a security vulnerability.

The following snippet is the old answer's code with a small modification: using a textarea instead of a div reduces the XSS vulnerability, but it is still problematic in IE9 and Firefox.

function htmlDecode(input){
  var e = document.createElement('textarea');
  e.innerHTML = input;
  // handle case of empty input
  return e.childNodes.length === 0 ? "" : e.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
}

htmlDecode("&lt;img src='myimage.jpg'&gt;"); 
// returns "<img src='myimage.jpg'>"

Basically I create a DOM element programmatically, assign the encoded HTML to its innerHTML and retrieve the nodeValue from the text node created on the innerHTML insertion. Since it just creates an element but never adds it, no site HTML is modified.

It will work cross-browser (including older browsers) and accept all the HTML Character Entities.

EDIT: The old version of this code did not work on IE with blank inputs, as evidenced here on jsFiddle (view in IE). The version above works with all inputs.

UPDATE: appears this doesn't work with large string, and it also introduces a security vulnerability, see comments.

Solution 4:

A more modern option for interpreting HTML (text and otherwise) from JavaScript is the HTML support in the DOMParser API (see here in MDN). This allows you to use the browser's native HTML parser to convert a string to an HTML document. It has been supported in new versions of all major browsers since late 2014.

If we just want to decode some text content, we can put it as the sole content in a document body, parse the document, and pull out the its .body.textContent.

var encodedStr = 'hello &amp; world';

var parser = new DOMParser;
var dom = parser.parseFromString(
    '<!doctype html><body>' + encodedStr,
    'text/html');
var decodedString = dom.body.textContent;

console.log(decodedString);

We can see in the draft specification for DOMParser that JavaScript is not enabled for the parsed document, so we can perform this text conversion without security concerns.

The parseFromString(str, type) method must run these steps, depending on type:

"text/html"

Parse str with an HTML parser, and return the newly created Document.

The scripting flag must be set to "disabled".

NOTE
script elements get marked unexecutable and the contents of noscript get parsed as markup.

It's beyond the scope of this question, but please note that if you're taking the parsed DOM nodes themselves (not just their text content) and moving them to the live document DOM, it's possible that their scripting would be reenabled, and there could be security concerns. I haven't researched it, so please exercise caution.

Solution 5:

Matthias Bynens has a library for this: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/he

Example:

console.log(
    he.decode("J&#246;rg &amp J&#xFC;rgen rocked to &amp; fro ")
);
// Logs "Jörg & Jürgen rocked to & fro"

I suggest favouring it over hacks involving setting an element's HTML content and then reading back its text content. Such approaches can work, but are deceptively dangerous and present XSS opportunities if used on untrusted user input.

If you really can't bear to load in a library, you can use the textarea hack described in this answer to a near-duplicate question, which, unlike various similar approaches that have been suggested, has no security holes that I know of:

function decodeEntities(encodedString) {
    var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
    textArea.innerHTML = encodedString;
    return textArea.value;
}

console.log(decodeEntities('1 &amp; 2')); // '1 & 2'

But take note of the security issues, affecting similar approaches to this one, that I list in the linked answer! This approach is a hack, and future changes to the permissible content of a textarea (or bugs in particular browsers) could lead to code that relies upon it suddenly having an XSS hole one day.