JavaScript automatically converts some special characters
character-encoding, javascript, jquery
Solution
That's because the browser (and not JavaScript) turns entities that don't need to be escaped in HTML into their respective Unicode characters (e.g. it skips `&`, `<` and `>`).
So by the time you inspect `.innerHTML`, it no longer contains exactly what was in the original page source; you could reverse this process, but it involves the full map of character `<->` entity pairs which is just not practical.
Problem
I need to extract a HTML-Substring with JS which is position dependent. I store special characters HTML-encoded. For example: HTML ``` <div id="test"><p>lösen & grüßen</p></div> ``` Text ``` lösen & grüßen ``` My problem lies in the JS-part, for example when I try to extract the fragment `lö`, which has the HTML-dependent starting position of `3` and the end position of `9` inside the `<div>` block. JS seems to convert some special characters internally so that the count from `3` to `9` is wrongly interpreted as "`lösen` " and not "`lö`". Other special characters like the `&` are not affected by this. So my question is, if someone knows why JS is behaving in that way? Characters like `ä` or `ö` are being converted while characters like `&` or ` ` are plain. Is there any possibility to avoid this conversion? I've set up a fiddle to demonstrate this: JSFiddle Thanks for any help! EDIT: Maybe I've explained it a bit confusing, sorry for that. What I want is the HTML: `<p>lösen & grüßen</p>` . Every special character should be unconverted, except the HTML-Tags. Like in the HTML above. But JS converts the `ö` or `ü` into `ö` or `ü` automatically, what I need to avoid.