Converting slashed utf8 string to latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) in Javascript

Question

I am receiving from backend the string "something \xe9 something else" and I would like to convert it to "something é something else".

I've done some search on that and haven't found anyone else with this same problem, however I came up with the following that worked for me:

function decode(str){
    return eval('"' + str + '"');
}