You can use the code given below without any jQuery:
function decodeEntities(encodedString) {
var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
textArea.innerHTML = encodedString;
return textArea.value;
}
console.log(decodeEntities('1 & 2')); // '1 & 2'
You can use <div> instead of <textarea> with untrusted user input is an XSS vulnerability, even if the <div> is never added to the DOM:
function decodeEntities(encodedString) {
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.innerHTML = encodedString;
return div.textContent;
}
// Shows an alert
decodeEntities('<img src="nonexistent_image" onerror="alert(1337)">')
However, this attack is not possible against a <textarea> because there are no HTML elements that are permitted content of a <textarea>. Consequently, any HTML tags still present in the 'encoded' string will be automatically entity-encoded by the browser.
function decodeEntities(encodedString) {
var textArea = document.createElement('textarea');
textArea.innerHTML = encodedString;
return textArea.value;
}
// Safe, and returns the correct answer
console.log(decodeEntities('<img src="nonexistent_image" onerror="alert(1337)">'))
Warning: Doing this using jQuery's .html() and .val() methods instead of using .innerHTML and .value is also insecure* for some versions of jQuery, even when using a textarea. This is because older versions of jQuery would deliberately and explicitly evaluate scripts contained in the string passed to .html(). Hence code like this shows an alert in jQuery 1.8:
//<!-- CDATA
// Shows alert
$("<textarea>")
.html("<script>alert(1337);</script>")
.text();
//-->
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
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