Show Numeric Code Reference (NCR) in alert

Question

Some characters in our database are stored in NCR (example 台 (台)).

I need to be able to show them in an alert window, so I need to translate the value to something that JavaScript can show.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

A simple solution is to use String.fromCharCode() on just the numeric value.

The static String.fromCharCode() method returns a string created by using the specified sequence of Unicode values.

First you'll need to strip the &#. We can do this with JavaScript's replace() method:

var symbol = "&#21488".replace("&#", "");

Then we can pass it into String.fromCharCode():

alert(String.fromCharCode(symbol));

---

Demo

var symbol = "&#21488".replace("&#", "");
alert(String.fromCharCode(symbol));

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Update

...the only problem is that has mixed content. For example: "12 Amp. Street &#21488"
– Panos K.

For this we can use a regular expression to match the symbol and replace it in-line.

var str = "12 Amp. Street &#21488";

For this I'm going to use the regular expression /&#(\d*)/, which matches the combination of "&#" followed by a group of any number of digits. Calling replace() as we did before, we can instead replace with a function which has two parameters: match, the entire match (&#21488) and number, the group of numbers (21488). From here we simply return String.fromCharCode(number):

var replaced = str.replace(/&#(\d*)/g, function(match, number) {
    return String.fromCharCode(number);
});

replaced should now contain the value "12 Amp. Street 台".

---

Demo

var str = "12 Amp. Street &#21488";

var replaced = str.replace(/&#(\d*)/g, function(match, number) {
  return String.fromCharCode(number);
});

alert(replaced);