On recursion - a bit more

I have to say that the more I use recursion to solve simple problems the more it makes sense and the easier it becomes.  The simple things in life are often where I find joy, and today's joy comes from perhaps a very silly but necessary piece of code.  When you entity encode UTF-8 in HTML entities, you and up with strings that have thinks like Ӓ in them.  This entity represents a single character for the purpose of considering string "length".  All the standard String functions return length not understanding that the content of the string is encoded.  Decoding it could lead to nasty unintended vulnerabilities, so I have created a function that copes with these functions.  In a previous life (or about a year ago), I would have solved this with what I would now consider a kind of ugly for loop.  Today, I prefer to solve more functionally:

 String.prototype.lengthDecoded = function(){
  return (this.length==0 ? 0 : 
     1 + (this.substring(0,1)=="&" ? this.substring(this.indexOf(";")+1).lengthDecoded() : this.substring(1).lengthDecoded()));
 }

I'm not convinced I have the best name yet, but in terms of brevity and clarity I think this is a massive improvement over a for loop which will always be in danger of off-by-one errors and simple verbosity.

Here we have what amounts to a single line of code, formatted for clarity that "eats" a string calculating its length as it goes.  Simple recursive solutions I'm finding are easier and clearer than their declarative counter-parts.  Other than the fact that I'm sitting here writing a blog post about it!

I have considered the idea of creating a subclass of string to do this too, but I'm not convinced the extra complexity that it would bring, and potential to simply not get the correct type in the right place versus using a different function would be better.  I could easily make an argument for either.