How to escape invalid characters inside XML string in C#

Question

I have an XML string in C#. This XML has several tags. In some of these tags there are invalid characters like '&' in the text. I need to escape these characters inside the text from the whole long XML string but I want to keep the tags.

I have tried HttpUtility.HtmlEncode and few other available methods but they encode the whole string rather then just the text inside the tags. Example tags are

<node1>This is a string & so is this</node1> should be converted to

<node1>This is a string &amp; so is this</node1>

Any ideas? thanks

P.S. I know similar question has been asked before I have not found a complete solution for this problem.

Georg · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25 16:33:02Z

2

I guess the simplest solution is to load the whole Xml document in memory as an XmlDocument and then go through the elements and replace the values with their html encoded form.

answered Feb 25, 2014 at 16:33

Georg

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1 Comment

Oliver Over a year ago

This may help: referencesource-beta.microsoft.com/#System/compmod/system/…

Only a Curious Mind · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25 16:31:55Z

1

you can use a CDATA field, like this:

<YourXml>
 <Id>1</Id>
 <Content>
    <![CDATA[
           your special caracteres
     ]]>
 </content>
</yourXml>

answered Feb 25, 2014 at 16:31

Only a Curious Mind

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Comments

Prajul G · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-26 10:27:45Z

1

I dont get what is the big deal in this. When you have the entire xml as a string, the easiest way to achieve what u want is to use the Replace function.

For example the whole xml is in the string str, then all u have to do is,

str.Replace("&" , "&amp;");

Thats it man. You have achieved whatever u wanted to. Some times very simple solutions exist for big problems. Hope this helps for you.

answered Feb 26, 2014 at 10:27

Prajul G

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Ondrej Svejdar · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25 16:45:04Z

0

XDocument or XmlDocument is a way to go. If for some crazy out of your control reason you need to encode just text blocks inside XmlElement:

using System.Text;
using System.Xml;

static string EncodeText(string unescapedText) {
  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(unescapedText)) {
    return unescapedText;
  }

  var builder = new StringBuilder(unescapedText.Length);
  using (var writer = XmlTextWriter.Create(builder, new XmlWriterSettings {
    ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Fragment
  })) {
    writer.WriteValue(unescapedText);
  }
  return builder.ToString();
}

answered Feb 25, 2014 at 16:45

Ondrej Svejdar

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