Plain Text Widgets do not display as HTML when option is selected

Steps to reproduce:

1. I have created an external item script in the default directory which echos "<b>toto</b>"
2. I have created a new widget in my dashboard to display the external item as HTML
3. instead of having a bold text toto i have the html text.

Result:
screenshot of external script is: test.sh.png

screenshot of widget settings is: widget.settings.png
screenshot of widget output is: widget.result.png

Expected:
Widget should display bold text by interpreting HTML. This feature was working ok in 3.4 and it stopped working after i migrated to 4.2.3