Unescape HTML entities in Javascript?

Question

I have some Javascript code that communicates with an XML-RPC backend. The XML-RPC returns strings of the form:

Answer 1

var encodedStr = 'hello & world';

var parser = new DOMParser;
var dom = parser.parseFromString(
    '' + encodedStr,
    'text/html');
var decodedString = dom.body.textContent;

console.log(decodedString);