[flexcoders] Properly display html entities in datagrid

[s_grollins]

Hello everyone,

I've recently come across a problem at work where in much of the data
we're getting is showing up in the data-grid as:

<b>The tags show<b> and the &quot; quotes &quot; aren't converted!

This is a problem and I'd like to be able to display this correctly:

The tags show and the " quotes " aren't converted!

We don't necessarily have too much control over the data, so I'm not
entirely sure how/why the items are coming up like this when some items
come up with characters like < > in them. For instance: "This is an item
> This is another item > In a breadcrumb trail". This shows up
correctly. I'm not sure what exactly should be done. But again since we
don't have control/access to the data, it cannot be changed or
substituted or converted to other formats. I thought of using htmlText
but that doesn't work if I have data like the "breadcrumb string" above
because it interprets the '<' characters as opening tags and doesn't
render the entire data:

[Bindable]
private var testString:String = "&lt;b&gt;6&lt;b&gt; 
&quot;seven&quot;";

<mx:Text text="{testString}" /> <!-- displays testString unchanged -->
<mx:Text htmlText="{testString}" /> <!-- displays: <b>6</b> -->

Any suggestions would definitely be appreciated, I'm sure I'm probably
not the only person that's come across this :( But basically we just
need all characters like: &lt; to be converted to '<' and &amp; to be
'&' meanwhile data that was encoded properly, data that has '<' and '&'
showing up correctly should be left the same.

Thanks in advance for any help :)