handle encoding / decoding

[alex-wilmer]

questions with special characters need to be encoded:

responses with special characters need to be decoded:

[owenip]

May I work on this issue? Thinking of using regex to decode the special characters.

[mihok]

Yas! Go for it @owenip

[owenip]

Hey @mihok , @alex-wilmer ,
I am wondering how many special characters should be supported. Please see HTML named character References.

Current Approaches for most common special characters

function unescapeHtml(text) {
  return text
    .replace(/&/g, '&')
    .replace(/&lt;/g, "<")
    .replace(/&gt;/g, ">")
    .replace(/&quot;/g, "\"")
    .replace(/&#039;/g, "'");
}

[alex-wilmer]

Isn't encodeURI and decodeURI sufficient for this?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURI

[owenip]

Not Escaped:
A-Z a-z 0-9 ; , / ? : @ & = + $ - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ) #

encodeURI doesn't handle those characters.

Also stackOverflow api return named characters which could not be converted by decodeURI