When are HTML entities left unparsed?

Question

I've run into something that I find a bit strange... There is a website with a <table> of audio file links, author, etc.

The link looks like:

<a href="Links/Audio/audio_file_1.mp3">This & That</a>

I found it strange that the & character is not written as & in the source file. If I use the Chrome Dev Tools (or Firefox) and change the content to This & That, the string & is visible, instead of just the & character. Why is that?

The table is using TableSorter, which I thought could be doing this under the hood... but even if I open it with Javascript disabled, the raw & character is still displayed, so that doesn't seem to the be culprit.

Answer 1

When are HTML entities left unparsed?

They aren't. The HTML is parsed as it's being read. This is completely independent of JavaScript.

I found it strange that the & character is not written as & in the source file.

Indeed, it should be, but it works the way it is because browsers handle invalid markup gracefully, and in fact that particular aspect is now encoded in the specification: An ampersand that isn't ambiguous is taken as a literal ampersand.

If I use the Chrome Dev Tools (or Firefox) and change the content to This & That, the string & is visible, instead of just the & character. Why is that?

When you view the DOM through Chrome's devtools and similar, you're seeing the live DOM represented in valid form, not the actual source file, so naturally the browser shows you that & as & (the entity it should have been in the source file).

Answer 2

This is independent to Javascript.

& and & has the same HTML number as : &, which is also the ASCII Dec provision of those symbols. You can take a look at here : http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

So I guess there is a problem with your code, they should be seen as the same symbol (&) in your screen.