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

There is an variant that 80% as productive as the answers at the very top.

See the benchmark: https://jsperf.com/decode-html12345678/1

console.log(decodeEntities('test: >'));

function decodeEntities(str) {
  // this prevents any overhead from creating the object each time
  const el = decodeEntities.element || document.createElement('textarea')

  // strip script/html tags
  el.innerHTML = str
    .replace(/]*>([\S\s]*?)<\/script>/gmi, '')
    .replace(/<\/?\w(?:[^"'>]|"[^"]*"|'[^']*')*>/gmi, '');

  return el.value;
}

If you need to leave tags, then remove the two .replace(...) calls (you can leave the first one if you do not need scripts).