I need to extract a HTML-Substring with JS which is position dependent. I store special characters HTML-encoded. For example: HTML <div id="test"><p>l&ouml;sen &amp; gr&uuml;&szlig;en</p></div>? Text lösen & grüßen My problem lies in the JS-part, for example when I try to extract the fragment lö, which has the HTML-dependent starting position of 3 and the end position of 9 inside the <div> block. JS seems to convert some special characters internally so that the count from 3 to 9 is wrongly interpreted as "lösen " and not "l&ouml;". Other special characters like the &amp; are not affected by this. So my question is, if someone knows why JS is behaving in that way? Characters like &auml; or &ouml; are being converted while characters like &amp; or &nbsp; are plain. Is there any possibility to avoid this conversion? I've set up a fiddle to demonstrate this: JSFiddle Thanks for any help! EDIT: Maybe I've explained it a bit confusing, sorry for that. What I want is the HTML: <p>l&ouml;sen &amp; gr&uuml;&szlig;en</p> . Every special character should be unconverted, except the HTML-Tags. Like in the HTML above. But JS converts the &ouml; or &uuml; into ö or ü automatically, what I need to avoid.