How can I get IE to recognize NBSP as NBSP instead of a space?

Question

For the following JavaScript:

function EscapedString(str) {
  var obj = document.createElement("span");
  obj.innerHTML = str;
  return "&#" + (obj.textContent || obj.innerText).charCodeAt(0) + ";";
}

alert(EscapedString(" "));
alert(EscapedString(" "));
alert(EscapedString("\xA0"));

IE returns   for each value instead of   like every other browser correctly does. Is .innerText the wrong property for IE?

Here's it running on jsbin.

Answer 1

Try this out. Split up the '&' character from 'nbsp'

alert('&' + 'nbsp');

That worked for me. are you able to do that?

if not, perhaps you can convert to ascii???

edited

  alert(String.fromCharCode(EscapedString(" ")))

Answer 2

Ah, I can access the value of the text node created by the innerHTML and that returns the correct value:

function EscapedString(str) {
  var obj = document.createElement("div");
  obj.innerHTML = str;
  return "&#" + (obj.firstChild.nodeValue || obj.textContent).charCodeAt(0) + ";";
}

Here's the latest script running on jsbin
...and here's the gist of the final code I ended up using