Can you retrieve the value from an attribute as it appeared in the source?

Question

Commenting on this question made me wonder.

In JavaScript, is it possible to get the "raw" value of a HTML attribute, i.e. the way it was written in the source before parsing?

Say you have this HTML:

<section id="theSection" title="The&#32;section">The section</section>

<script>
 console.log(document.getElementById('theSection').title);
</script>
 

What do I need to write in the script to make it output the original escaped value of the title, rather than the parsed one?
JavaScript nodes have a lot of properties and values, but in this case, none that say "The section" instead of "The section".

Answer 1

There is no way to get parsed Unicode charachter in the browser like source HTML file and as   is a space then we can use this workaround for any title has space between its words.

<section id="theSection" title="The&#32;section">The section</section>

<script>
 console.log(document.getElementById('theSection').title.split(' ').join('&#32;'));
</script>
 

I know it is silly answer, but if really intended to process space unicode then hit the url which has this <section id="theSection" title="The&#32;section">The section</section> with fetch(url) like below:

fetch('stackoverflow.com')
  .then(async (res) => {
    const text = await res.text();
   // process the text with any unicode charachter as it is now 100% string 
  }
);

Now the source HTML file is a string. It is better to use in your case javascript on string with a regex to find what do you want to process in html source.