170486 - Entities in select box are not interpreted, if created by javascript

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Heinrich Stamerjohanns]

On the above URL, you can find a simple script, where the content of
the select boxes is created dynamically. By switching from one button
to the other, corresponding entries in the select box are displayed.
However, entities created by javascript seem not to be interpreted at all. 
(the initial display is correct, then click on English, then go back to German)

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

That's correct.  The entity syntax is HTML syntax, not JS syntax.  In HTML4 (not
XHTML, but this page is not XHTML) the script is _not_ parsed by the HTML parser
and is just passed to the JS engine.  If you want non-ascii chars in there you
will need to use the standard JS unicode escapes.

Comment 2

[Phil Schwartau]

Marking Verified.

Here is a useful URL for HTML entities:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html

It contains this data for the character Ä:

        Character                          Entity    Decimal    Hex
Latin capital letter A with diaeresis       Ä    Ä   Ä


We can also find this character in the charts at www.unicode.org:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf


To write this non-ASCII character in JavaScript, you can use either
of these ASCII escapes for it:

                 Hexadecimal escape:   "\xC4"
                 Unicode escape:       "\u00C4"

You can test these out with these javascript:URLs 

                 javascript: alert("\xC4gypten")
                 javascript: alert("\u00C4gypten")