Parsing Strings With jQuery : DevKick Blog
http://devkick.com/blog/parsing-strings-with-jquery/

jqueryによる文字列操作　正規表現を活用　urlアドレスのa要素化、htmlタグの削除など

When you talk about “text,” you’re probably thinking of “characters and symbols on my computer screen.” But computers don’t deal in characters and symbols; they deal in bits and bytes. Every piece of text you’ve ever seen on a computer screen is actually stored in a particular character encoding. Very roughly speaking, the character encoding provides a mapping between the stuff you see on your screen and the stuff your computer actually stores in memory and on disk. There are many different character encodings, some optimized for particular languages like Russian or Chinese or English, and others that can be used for multiple languages. In reality, it’s more complicated than that. Many characters are common to multiple encodings, but each encoding may use a different sequence of bytes to actually store those characters in memory or on disk. So you can think of the character encoding as a kind of decryption key.

Everything you thought you knew about strings is wrong.

also about UTF-32, UTF-16, UTF-8