On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:01 PM, DeHaynes &lt;ew1560(a)wayne.edu&gt; wrote: What type of field are you referring to? HTML input field? Is it a text area or an input with type=text? How do you get the value from the field? If the value contains &nbsp; then it's probably HTML so removing the HTML encoding will break the HTML as you can also have &gt; or &lt; before <em>&nbsp;1 &lt; 2</em> after I guess what you are trying to achieve is to get the plain text from an HTML content. Hope this helps, Marius