Using WordPress API with React - Parsing Special Characters

While I was working with the WordPress REST API, I encountered that the response from the WordPress API contained few undesired things such as HTML tags and special characters such as ’. For example:

<p>Hey there! A young and eager to learn native English speaker
here. I&#8217;m a Materials Science graduate from the University
of Cambridge and have a broad range of experiences in
engineering and education, from saving elephants in 
South Africa to manufacturing design in Cyprus. I&#8217;m happy
to code and develop my skills as an intern.</p>

I wanted to get rid of the <p> tags and replace the special characters with appropriate human-readable characters.

After spending some time on solving this problem, I found a couple of node packages which solve my problem. They are

• striptags
• he

Let's first start with striptags. Install it using:

npm i striptags

Here's an example usage of striptags:

import striptags from 'striptags';
var html = <p>Functional consultant specialized on financials
 modules of Oracle E-Business Suite.</p>

striptags(html);

You can actually do a lot of things with this package, for example, you can decide which tags you want to keep, and which tags you want to replace.

So the next problem was that I was receiving some special characters like I’m, which was meant to be I'm. To solve this,  I made use of a decoder named as he.

Installed the package using:

npm install he

Then, I used the package

import he from 'he';

he.decode('Hey there! A young and eager to learn native English 
speaker here. I’m a Materials Science graduate from the
University of Cambridge and have a broad range of experiences 
in engineering and education, from saving elephants in South
Africa to manufacturing design in Cyprus. I’m happy to code
and develop my skills as an intern.');

And the output was

Hey there! A young and eager to learn native English speaker here.
I'm a Materials Science graduate from the University of Cambridge
and have a broad range of experiences in engineering and education, 
from saving elephants in South Africa to manufacturing design
in Cyprus. I'm happy to code and develop my skills as an intern.

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