Datatables not decoding htmlentities while trying to get the data

chitturirakhi

When I try to read the data from datatables using rows().data() api, its not decoding html entities.

For example if I sent this data to datatables

Tiger & Nixon
Garrett > Winters

When I try to read it - its giving me data like below

[["Garrett > Winters"], ["Tiger & Nixon"]]

Please see the below link
http://live.datatables.net/siqizuwa/1/edit

Kindly suggest whats the best way i can get all the values in the table.

Thanks.

rf1234

I don't have the problem with values read from the database. But I came across it when exporting to Excel. I resolved it this way:
http://live.datatables.net/fikizipu/1/edit

chitturirakhi

@rf1234 considering my datatable contains big texts in the column which can have commas, converting array to string and replacing will make it difficult to identify them back and I have many grids with different structures and some with renders. So any other better alternative?

rf1234

@rf1234 considering my datatable contains big texts in the column which can have commas, converting array to string and replacing will make it difficult

Of course you shouldn't do it that way. I only did it to make the point in the test case. You can simply loop through the array and convert each array entry
http://live.datatables.net/fikizipu/2/edit

I don't have an alternative, but maybe someone else has.

allan

When I try to read the data from datatables using rows().data() api, its not decoding html entities.

Correct - it just passed back the original data. And since your table is reading the data from the HTML the browser is automatically correctly the invalid HTML (un-escaped entity).

Best option: Use Ajax or Javascript sourced data and this wouldn't be a problem.

Otherwise, if your HTML has entities in it, you would need to un-encode them when reading from the data method.

Allan