[anant1811]

Upgrader debug messages from Shiny Updates are logged to the browser console via wp.sanitize.stripTagsAndEncodeText(), which intentionally returns HTML-escaped text. Because the console shows plain text, messages appear with raw character references, e.g. Unpacking the package….

This PR strips tags and decodes character references with DOMParser (body.textContent) before logging, and skips non-string messages. stripTagsAndEncodeText() itself is unchanged, as other callers rely on its escaped output. Decoding happens client-side only because the same messages are also used in emails/logs server-side.

Tests

• Adds QUnit tests for wp.updates.ajaxAlways() (tests/qunit/wp-admin/js/updates-ajax-always.js): decoding, tag stripping, no markup execution, non-string skipping. They fail without the fix.
• Loads updates.js in the QUnit suite and fixes the _wpUpdatesItemCounts fixture (totals lacked counts, which made refreshCount() throw on load).

Testing instructions

1. Go to Plugins > Add New, open the browser console.
2. Install any plugin.
3. Before: Downloading installation package from …zip…. After: Downloading installation package from …zip….

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59890

Use of AI Tools

AI assistance: Yes
Tool(s): Claude Code
Model(s): Claude Opus 5.5
Used for: Investigation, implementation, tests and local verification, under my direction.

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This Pull Request is for code review only. Please keep all other discussion in the Trac ticket. Do not merge this Pull Request. See GitHub Pull Requests for Code Review in the Core Handbook for more details.

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