How to put in text when using XElement.

Question

I'm using the new System.Xml.Linq to create HTML documents (Yes, I know about HtmlDocument, but much prefer the XDocument/XElement classes). I'm having a problem inserting   (or any other HTML entity). What I've tried already:

1. Just putting text in directly doesn't work because the & gets turned int &. new XElement("h1", "Text to keep together.");

2. I tried parsing in the raw XML using the following, but it barfs with this error:

   XElement.Parse("Text to keep together.");

   --> Reference to undeclared entity 'nbsp'.`

3. Try number three looks like the following. If I save to a file, there is just a space, the   gets lost.

---

var X = new XDocument(new XElement("Name", KeepTogether("Hi Mom!")));
private static XNode KeepTogether(string p)`
{
    return XElement.Parse("<xml>" + p.Replace(" ", "&#160;") + "</xml>").FirstNode;
}

I couldn't find a way to just shove the raw text through without it getting escaped. Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

You could also try using numbered entities, they need no declaration. Numbered entity equivalent to the named entity   is  

Answer 2

I couldn't find a way to just shove the raw text through without it getting escaped.

Just put the Unicode character in that   refers to (U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE) directly in a text node, then let the serializer worry about whether it needs escaping to   or not. (Probably not: if you are using UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 as your page encoding the character can be included directly without having to worry about encoding it into an entity reference or character reference).

new XElement("h1", "Text\u00A0to\u00A0keep\u00A0together");

Answer 3

 

Answer 4

If you want to be safe adding HTML in your XML you have to use CDATA

string xml = "<xml><![CDATA[All the HTML you want]]></xml>";

Answer 5

I came up with this slightly daft approach which suits me: String replace all the & with ##AMP## when you store the data.... And reverse that operation on output. I am using this in conjunction with XElement SQL column and works a treat.

Regards

Neil

Answer 6

Replacing the & with a marker like ##AMP## solved my problem. Maybe not the prettiest solution but I got a demo for a customer in 10 mins so...I don't care :)

Thx for the idea

Answer 7

I know this is old, but I found something and I'm rather surprised!

XElement element = new XElement("name",new XCData("<br /> & etc"));

And there you go! CDATA text!