How to parse XML form-data in c#

Question

So, I've got a SMS service posting data to an ASP page.

The data is coming in as HTML encoded xml. It looks like this when I read it from the InputStream directly:

 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="xml"

&lt;POSTBACK&gt;
    &lt;NOTIFICATION id="4254" created="2012-07-02 13:35:46.629214-04"&gt;
    &lt;ORIGIN&gt;SMS_MO&lt;/ORIGIN&gt;
    &lt;CODE&gt;N211&lt;/CODE&gt;
    &lt;BODY&gt;&lt;FROM&gt;+15035555555&lt;/FROM&gt;&lt;TO&gt;60856&lt;/TO&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt;cats are cats&lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;RECEIVED&gt;2012-07-02 13:35:46.038477-04&lt;/RECEIVED&gt;&lt;/BODY&gt;
    &lt;/NOTIFICATION&gt;
&lt;/POSTBACK&gt;
------------------------------fde0d0d3bf3c--

I know I can manually go in and replace the character codes and then read it into an XmlDoc... which is what I am doing for time's sake.

What I'm wondering is if there is a native data type or built-in class to handle XML form data?

Tried:

string cleanString = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(strRawtext);

but it looks the same for some reason.

Chris Gessler · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-02 18:50:04Z

1

HttpUtility.HtmlDecode Method should be able to handle this.

This worked fine for me:

private static void HtmlDecodeTest()
{
    string html = @"
&lt;POSTBACK&gt;
    &lt;NOTIFICATION id=""4254"" created=""2012-07-02 13:35:46.629214-04""&gt;
    &lt;ORIGIN&gt;SMS_MO&lt;/ORIGIN&gt;
    &lt;CODE&gt;N211&lt;/CODE&gt;
    &lt;BODY&gt;&lt;FROM&gt;+15035555555&lt;/FROM&gt;&lt;TO&gt;60856&lt;/TO&gt;&lt;TEXT&gt;cats are cats&lt;/TEXT&gt;&lt;RECEIVED&gt;2012-07-02 13:35:46.038477-04&lt;/RECEIVED&gt;&lt;/BODY&gt;
    &lt;/NOTIFICATION&gt;
&lt;/POSTBACK&gt;";

    string x = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(html);
    Console.WriteLine(x);
}

Results:

        <POSTBACK>
            <NOTIFICATION id="4254" created="2012-07-02 13:35:46.629214-04">
            <ORIGIN>SMS_MO</ORIGIN>
            <CODE>N211</CODE>
            <BODY><FROM>+15035555555</FROM><TO>60856</TO><TEXT>cats are cats</TE
XT><RECEIVED>2012-07-02 13:35:46.038477-04</RECEIVED></BODY>
            </NOTIFICATION>
        </POSTBACK>

edited Jul 2, 2012 at 18:50

answered Jul 2, 2012 at 17:57

Chris Gessler

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2 Comments

FlavorScape Over a year ago

this doesn't seem to produce results when doing string decoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(strRawtext); hmm.

FlavorScape Over a year ago

Err. Yeah so my "log" for tracking the results was XML itself, so when I inserted it as InnerText for testing, it converted everything back into html encoding. dur. so now i'm appending the real nodes and it's good.

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