decodeURIComponent not working

Question

I have the following code:

var msg = "Research &amp; Analysis",
    decoder = decodeURIComponent(msg);

console.log(msg);
console.log(decoder);

Can someone please help me understand why the decodeURIComponent(msg); is not actually decoding the & in the string?

I am expecting it to return something like Research & Analysis instead of Research & Analysis

What do you expect `decodeURIComponent` to do here? – deceze Sep 12 '16 at 09:04 — deceze, Sep 12 '16 at 09:04

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 12 '16 at 09:06

4

decodeURIComponent decodes, well, URI components, meaning URL-encoded strings. & is an HTML entity, not URL-encoding. decodeURIComponent has nothing to do with HTML encoding.

answered Sep 12 '16 at 09:06

deceze

510,633
85
743
889

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

I would like to refer you to the documentation of the encode and decode function:

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_encodeuricomponent.asp http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_decodeuricomponent.asp

As you can probably understand now, encoding and decoding of an uri has nothing to do with & but is something different.

For the real answer I'd like to refer you to another question + answer here: Decode & back to & in JavaScript

decodeURIComponent not working

2 Answers2