How to filter results with special characters using jQuery DataTables plugin?

Question

I am using the jQuery DataTables plugin in my application, and many of my table rows and filters have special characters, specifically ampersands (&) in them. When I try to filter on these columns, all records disappear and it displays "no matching records found".

I have tried encoding (i.e. htmlspecialchars) and decoding (i.e. htmlspecialchars_decode) the strings before they are printed onto the page, but neither seems to be working.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/gkdcZ/3/

Any ideas why this might be happening, and how I can fix it?

HTML:

<select id="filter_col_1" name="filter_col_1">
    <option value="">Select</option>
    <option value="A&B">A&B</option>
    <option value="C">C</option>
    <option value="D">D</option>   
</select>

<tr>
    <td>A&B</td>
    <td>Jones, Brandon</td>
    <td>01/02/2003</td>
</tr>

JavaScript:

$("#filter_col_1").change( function() { 
    $('#results').dataTable().fnFilter(
        '\\b' + $("#filter_col_1").val() + '\\b',
        1,
        true,
        false
    );
} );    

UPDATE #1: Issue appears to only happen when you limit the column. See DataTables API. Works fine when parameter is set to "null". http://jsfiddle.net/gkdcZ/4/

UPDATE #2: A bit closer. Adding in a function to replace HTML Entities works for certain characters (i.e. ampersands), but does not work for other characters (i.e. exclamation points and question marks). See http://jsfiddle.net/cz6Bs/4/

'\\b' + htmlEntities($('#filter_col_1').val()) + '\\b'

function htmlEntities(str) {
return String(str).replace(/&/g, '&')
                  .replace(/</g, '&lt;')
                  .replace(/>/g,     '&gt;')
                  .replace(/"/g, '&quot;');
}

Answer 1

There is indeed a bug with dataTables that causes problems with any special chars so you'll have to escape them.

http://jsfiddle.net/cz6Bs/

Note: I added XRegExp as another resource for the escaping. http://xregexp.com/