We have run into this issues as well with Internet feeds that do not always obey UTF-8 encoding. We have developed a server-side script to scrub the content before it is sent to the Widget. Is a server side script something that could be used with your Widget?

A server-sided script may be an option but I think if there is no string function, it would be easier to write one. There are only some special characters in western-european languages to be replaced - totally 23 (umlauts, vocals with accents, n with tilde). So, I think I will implement an own function that scans the html data for unicode strings and replaces them with the real letter. The easiest way may be to scan the string for '#' at first and if this character occurs to search for unicodes and replace them.

The issue is that your data has HTML entities inside the string (the ö is an HTML control sequence). If a server side script is not an option as suggested by Brian, then I would suggest doing as you indicated by doing a regexp to match those sequences and replace them with real characters. Do remember, the platform is Javascript, so this is a problem which has already been solved and so you don't need to solve it again. See:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=javascrip...l+entity+decode

That said, to save you some time, I would likely use this if it were me:

http://phpjs.org/functions/html_entity_decode:424

-Jeremy

Fantastic recommendation. Always something good.

I use this solution now:



... this (in continuation) for all necessary special characters.