仅将首次出现的内容替换为JavaScript

Question

I have a string that comes from HTML without tags but with escaped symbols, like:

abc&symbol1;def&symbol2;ghi&symbol3;jkl...

In JavaScript or TypeScript, how can I replace all sequences like &symbolN; with one fixed character like X so I get:

abcXdefXghiXjkl...

(by the way, the target is to get the length of a string with distinct HTML escaped characters like £ so that each one of them is counted like one character)

Update : maybe I've not explained accurately: symbol1, symbol2,... do not mean that "symbol" string repeats, but completely distinct symbols that DO NOT repeat, eg "abc£def ghi€..." So no way to use a repeating textual pattern like "&symbol;"

Answer 1

Just to calculate length, you can cheat, as you say:

html.replace(/&[^;]+;/, 'X').length

To convert HTML into text properly, one should use a HTML parser, not regexp. For example, in browser,

let e = document.createElement('div');
e.innerHTML = html;
let text = e.textContent;