Decode html entities using javascript

Below is the code to decode the html entities using javascript rather than the Server side scripting

function decodeEntities(input) {
    var y = document.createElement('textarea');
    y.innerHTML = input;
    return y.value;
}

Above function just receives the html values like below

var str = "<p>Hello World<br />This is the test message";

When we pass the above HTML string to the function it returns as below,

calling the JAVASCRIPT function 

decodeEntities(str)

Output is: "&lt;p&gt;Hello World&lt;br/&gt;This is the test message";