Convert HTML Entities code doesn't work

[pg86]

Tell us what’s happening:
I can’t get my code to work however, it works on repl.it. Please can anyone tell me why FCC wont accept it? Thanks

Your code so far
function convertHTML(str) {
var newStr = str.split(’’);
for (var i = 0; i < newStr.length; i++) {
if(newStr[i] === ‘&’){
newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace(’&’, ‘&’);
} else if(newStr[i] === ‘<’){
newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace(’<’, ‘&​lt;’);
} else if(newStr[i] === ‘>’){
newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace(’>’, ‘&​gt;’);
} else if(newStr[i] === ‘"’){
newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace(’"’, ‘&​quot;’);
} else if(newStr[i] === “’”){
newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace("’", ‘&​apos;’);
}
}
return newStr.join(’’);
}

convertHTML(“Sixty > twelve”);

function convertHTML(str) {
  var newStr = str.split('');
  for (var i = 0; i < newStr.length; i++) {
    if(newStr[i] === '&'){
      newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace('&', '&amp;');
    } else if(newStr[i] === '<'){
      newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace('<', '&​lt;');
    } else if(newStr[i] === '>'){
      newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace('>', '&​gt;');
    } else if(newStr[i] === '"'){
      newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace('"', '&​quot;');
    } else if(newStr[i] === "'"){
      newStr[i] = newStr[i].replace("'", '&​apos;');
    } 
  }
  return newStr.join('');
}

convertHTML("Sixty > twelve");

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:

freeCodeCamp.org

[lionel-rowe]

My answer from another thread with the same issue:

@lionel-rowe

This bug is a little bizarre. I’m guessing you copy/pasted the entities from the test descriptions, which “escape” the entities in a rather unusual way, and as a result, you get this:

'&​amp;' === '&' //false
'&​amp;'.length //6
'&​amp;'.split(''); //["&", "​", "a", "m", "p", ";"]
'&​amp;'.codePointAt(1).toString(16); //"200b"

That codepoint, U+200B , is a zero-width space . It’s one of a few zero-width characters in Unicode that are very useful for specialized applications but can also poop on your parade when you least expect it.

Delete all those zero-width spaces and your code should pass the test cases with no problems.

However, I’d also recommend you look at simplifying and optimizing your code. str.split('') gives an array where each element is a string of length = 1, yet you’re using the replace method, which is useful for changing a substring of an existing string. When your string is only 1 character long, any substring is either the full string or is empty.

[miku86]

Retype the copied entities, e.g. <, then it will work.

[pg86]

Thank you both for your fast responses. Much appreciated