JavaScript Get real length of a string (without entities)

Question

I need to determine the length of string which may contain html-entities.

For example \"&darr ;\" (↓) would return length 6, which is correct, but I want these

Answer 1

Since there's no solution using jQuery yet:

var str = 'lol&';
alert($('').html(str).text().length); // alerts 4

Uses the same approach like karim79, but it never adds the created element to the document.