Unexpected Token on decodeURIComponent

Question

I have a parameter in my grails view which I am passing to javascript code

<g:if test="${replacedString}">
    ${replacedString}
    <g:set var="replacedString" value="${replacedString}"/>
</g:if>
<script>
   var mydata = decodeURIComponent(${replacedString});
   console.log(mydata);
</script>

The replacedString value is being passed as an encoded string i.e: " appears as ". Due to this I have the method

decodeURIComponent

This is the string I'm trying to decode:

[{"description":"test1 ","filenameAndPath":"test1.pdf"},{"description":"test file","filenameAndPath":"test copy.pdf"},{"description":"","filenameAndPath":""},{"description":"","filenameAndPath":""}]

This block of code keeps throwing the error Syntax error: Unexpected token &.
Am I missing something obvious ?

Answer 1

This is HTML encoded.

use this trick from here:-

var encoded = "[{"description":"test1 ","filenameAndPath":"test1.pdf"},{"description":"test file","filenameAndPath":"test copy.pdf"},{"description":"","filenameAndPath":""},{"description":"","filenameAndPath":""}]"

var elem = document.createElement('textarea');
elem.innerHTML = encoded;
var decoded = elem.value;

console.log(decoded);

See here for the differences in HTML and URL Encoding