Question: I have a .NET MVC page with a list of items that each have
`<%: %>` encoded descriptions in the `rel`.
I want to be able to search for all items with a `rel` that contains my search query.

One of the fields has a value with htmlentities `rel='D&eacute;coration'`

I type "Décoration" in the search box, let jQuery search for all elements that have a 'rel' attribute that contains (indexOf != -1) that value:

**no results!**

Why? because `Décoration != D&eacute;coration`.

What would be the best solution to compare these two? (Has to work for all special accented characters, not just `&eacute;`)

P.S. (I tried escape/unescape on both sides, also tried the trick to append it to a div and then read it as text, this replaces dangerous stuff, but doesn't replace é (it doesn't have to because it's valid in utf-8 anyway))

Answer: 
If you serve your pages with UTF-8 encoding, you won't need to use entities for all the accented characters. Problem solved.
You can decode the html entities.
Just copy the two javascript methods from [HERE](http://phpjs.org/functions/html_entity_decode:424)

```
var decoded = 'Décoration';
var entity = html_entity_decode('D&eacute;coration');
console.log(decoded == entity);

```