How to prevent JavaScript from automatically escaping certain characters?

I have a string of values that I need to transpose to an object. I’ve encountered a weird issue where when the JS code is executed in the browser, it automatically converts certain characters into encoded HTML entities.

The code is as follows:

function split_to_objects(string) {
    var output = {}
    string.split('').reduce(function(object, value, index) {
        output[index] = value;
    }, {})
    return output
}

var input_string = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstu!"#$%&'(),-./0123456789:;<=>?@[\]^_`';
var output_obj = split_to_objects(input_string);

console.log(output_obj);

This produces the output of:

{
  0: "A",
  1: "B",
  10: "K",
  11: "L",
  12: "M",
  13: "N",
  14: "O",
  15: "P",
  16: "Q",
  17: "R",
  18: "S",
  19: "T",
  2: "C",
  20: "U",
  21: "V",
  22: "W",
  23: "X",
  24: "Y",
  25: "Z",
  26: "a",
  27: "b",
  28: "c",
  29: "d",
  3: "D",
  30: "e",
  31: "f",
  32: "g",
  33: "h",
  34: "i",
  35: "j",
  36: "k",
  37: "l",
  38: "m",
  39: "n",
  4: "E",
  40: "o",
  41: "p",
  42: "q",
  43: "r",
  44: "s",
  45: "t",
  46: "u",
  47: "!",
  48: """,
  49: "#",
  5: "F",
  50: "$",
  51: "%",
  52: "&",
  53: "'",
  54: "(",
  55: ")",
  56: ",",
  57: "-",
  58: ".",
  59: "/",
  6: "G",
  60: "0",
  61: "1",
  62: "2",
  63: "3",
  64: "4",
  65: "5",
  66: "6",
  67: "7",
  68: "8",
  69: "9",
  7: "H",
  70: ":",
  71: ";",
  72: "<",
  73: "=",
  74: ">",
  75: "?",
  76: "@",
  77: "[",
  78: "",
  79: "]",
  8: "I",
  80: "^",
  81: "_",
  82: "`",
  9: "J"
}

As you can see some characters such as & became & or < became <. So my question is, how can we modify the function to produce the output object values that is identical to the original character like in the string?