Question

What are the illegal characters for ID name of controls (ASP.NET)?

Asked by: bemara57

I've run into some frustrating scenarios in coding in ASP.NET 2.0 until I came to realize that there are some illegal characters I can't put in the ID name of controls. For example, $ and / give me problems if I put those items in the ID. So:

<asp:TextBox ID="Text$Box1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<asp:TextBox ID="Text/Box1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>

These give me problems and you'd never getting a debugging error. You'd figure something wacky going on during run time. So are there any other characters I should avoid? The reason why I ask is because I want to put file names (with periods) with underscores in the ID and wasn't sure that's a problem I'll be facing down the road. Something like this:

<asp:TextBox ID="Text1_somefile.htm" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>

The reason why I do this is so I know what file the textbox is referencing with some custom methods going on in the background. Plus when I'm dynamically creating these controls, the ID will always turn out to be unique (well almost because I had to stay away from putting the absolute path of the file because '/' was giving me problems as mentioned above). Anything  I should be concerned about?

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Asked On
2008-01-15 at 07:54:30ID23084265
Tags

characters

,

id

,

illegal

Topics

Programming for ASP.NET

,

.NET Framework 2.x

,

Visual Studio

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
1

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Answers

 

by: tusharashahPosted on 2008-01-15 at 08:04:39ID: 20663728

Only combinations of alphanumeric characters and the underscore character ( _ ) are valid values for this property. Including spaces, periods or other invalid characters will cause an ASP.NET page parser error (at run time).

Source: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.id.aspx

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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