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How can I unescape a string from python using javascript

So I'm trying to work on passing a url from my backend to my frontend and it has some escaping going on such that by the time the string gets to the frontend it looks something like &#34www.test.com&#34.
Is there a way I can unescape this string or is my best solution here to just manually replace substrings of &#34 with quotes?
Thanks for your help!

'&#34www.test.com&#34'.replace(/&#34/g,'')
output:
"www.test.com"

Handling a windows-1250 URI in node.js/express

My app depends on a webservice to form it's URIs, so sometimes it comes up with (what I believe is) a windows-1250 encoded string (/punk%92d) and express fails as follows:
Connect
400 Error: Failed to decode param 'punk%92d'
at Layer.match
So I thought about converting each link to that segment into utf-8 (example: /punk’d, so there would be no reference to the offending enconding), and back again to windows-1250 to work with the external webservice.
I tried this approach using both iconv and iconv-lite but there's always something wrong with the results: /punk d, /punk�d, etc.
Here's a sample using iconv:
var str = 'punk’d';
var buf = new Buffer(str.toString('binary'), 'binary');
console.log(new Iconv('UTF-8', 'Windows-1250').convert(buf).toString('binary'));
…and iconv-lite:
console.log(iconv.decode(new Buffer(str), 'win1250'));
I know using binary is a bad approach, but I was hoping something, anything would just do the job. I obviously tried multiple variations of this code since my knowledge of Buffers is limited, an even simpler things wouldn't work, like:
console.log(new Buffer('punk’d').toString('utf-8'));
So I'm interested in either a way to handle those encoded strings in the URI within express, or an effective way to convert them within node.js.

Sorry if this seems like too simple of a thing to try, but since Node and Express are both JavaScript, have you tried simply using decodeURIComponent('punk’d')? It looks to me that it's simply a standard encoded URI. I think you're getting that weird output from iconv because you're converting from the wrong encoding.

Converting Chinese UTF8 to readable string

I'm trying to convert Chinese characters in a XML file to readable Chinese string using javascript, but I'm not sure how to. I have checked other SO posts, and tried the following
unescape(encodeURIComponent('丘'))
but still can't get it to work, and wondering if someone could help?
<utf8>丘</utf8>

Neither unescape nor encodeURIComponent (which deal with percent-encoding) will help you with a XML character entity. You just want to parse the XML file! Accessing the DOM then will yield the expected string.

Sending iso-8859-1 via AJAX POST request?

first of all it is a userscript and I can't change the server-side encoding.
My problem is that when using encodeURIComponent() for encoding POST params (later sent via xhr.setRequestHeader), the characters are encoded in utf-8, but the server needs to receive iso-8859-1 data. Is there an alternative to encodeURIComponent() that would encode in iso-8859-1 ?
.
To make sure you understand, here is an exemple:
A classic form on the website send é like this: yournewmessage:%E9
Ajax via xhr.send('yournewmessage='+encodeURIComponent('é')) sends this: yournewmessage:%E9%80%80
The server needs the former. Thanks to anyone who can help me.

So, I’ve since figured out this problem. What I did was searching for an equivalence between utf-8 and iso-8859-1, what I found was between utf-8 and cp1252 (Windows-1252) so there are two conversions, utf-8 to cp1252 and cp1252 to iso-8859-1 (these two having a lot of similarities)
http://pastebin.com/jTDqR2PQ
Ugly code, comments left in French, and unelegant solution, but I feel bad seeing this question unansered while I actually found a solution that works.

Special characters in my javascript variables keep showing up as �, how do i prevent this?

I have a javascript script which is calling a php page to supply an ajax form with suggestions. The suggestions are returned fine by the php page, but for some reason, when i set the responsetext of the javascript object request as an element in my HTML page, all the special characters (ie. á or ã) show up as this question mark. Is there a function II must run on the response text of the request to make sure these are read properly?
Thanks.

If you are not serving your HTML pages as UTF-8, the browser will guess an encoding, typically a single-byte Windows codepage depending on the user's locale.
But this doesn't happen for AJAX. With XMLHttpRequest, unless you specifically state an encoding in the Content-Type: ...; charset= parameter, the browser will treat it as UTF-8. That means if you are actually serving Windows code page 1252 (Western European) content, you will get an invalid UTF-8 sequence and consequent question mark.
You don't want to be using a non-UTF-8 encoding! Make sure you are using UTF-8 throughout your application. Serve all your pages with Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8, store your data in UTF-8 tables, use mysql_set_charset() to choose UTF-8, etc.
In any case consider passing AJAX responses using JSON. The function json_encode() will create a JSON string that uses JavaScript escape sequences for non-ASCII characters, which avoids any problem of encoding mismatch. Also this is easier to extend to add functionality than returning raw HTML.

I would try, in your php script, to encode everything as html entities.
This can be easily tested by doing something like this before returning the results to javascript:
$results = htmlentities($htmlstring);
There's also the htmlspecialchars function you might try.
More about this here:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php