Question

How can I keep html formatting within an element when writing C# with LINQ

Asked by: klunde

Hi

I have some code where I'm trying to create  a new xml file with text from an external textfile.

I read the textfile info a string and then I change it to include paragaphs like this:

textFileContent = "<p>" + textFileContent.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "</p><p>") + "</p>";

now I would like to write this to my xml file, but XElement translates all my newly added <p> tags into &lt;p&gt;'s

How can I keep my <p> tags when creating the xml file?

//Create xmlfile
            XDocument doc2 =
                new XDocument(
                    new XDeclaration("1.0", "iso-8859-1", string.Empty),
                    new XElement("Article",
                        new XElement("body", textFileContent),

                                  
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Asked On
2009-09-24 at 02:39:19ID24757767
Tags

C# Visual Studio

,

LINQ

Topics

Microsoft Visual C#.Net

,

Language Integrated Query - LINQ

,

Visual Studio

Participating Experts
1
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: naspinskiPosted on 2009-09-24 at 02:45:01ID: 25411425

enclose it in CDATA brackets, that way all formatting is ignored.
http://www.w3schools.com/xmL/xml_cdata.asp

new XElement("body", "<![CDATA[" + textFileContent + "]]>"),

                                              
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by: klundePosted on 2009-09-24 at 03:01:00ID: 25411493

That would have been great, but unfortunelately, the system I'm sending the file to doesn't accept CData, so I can't use that. I need to send the file as

<body>
<p>text text text</p>
<p>text text text</p>
<p>text text text</p>
<p>text text text</p>
</body>

 

by: klundePosted on 2009-09-24 at 03:02:15ID: 25411499

(btw, if that was the case I could have just used "new XCData" instead of "new XElement")

 

by: naspinskiPosted on 2009-09-24 at 03:08:51ID: 25411537

the only other way I see it would be to do some conversion on both sides, as your setup of sending straight xml won't work at all.  There is no way that I know of without CDATA to run < & > through xml without screwing everything up.

Just an idea, but something like this would work:

// convert < & > to ((( & ))) for storage
new XElement("body", textFileContent.Replace("<","(((").Replace(">",")))")),
 
//then on the other side convert them back

                                              
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by: klundePosted on 2009-09-24 at 03:48:56ID: 25411804

As I have no control ot the "other side" this can't be used either. I must find some way to create the file as described above.

Now I'm thinking that maybe I should try to read the textfile into an array based on newline and then create new P elements based on the array. Hmm..

 

by: klundePosted on 2009-09-24 at 05:38:52ID: 25412599

Well, after a lot of trial and error I've figured out how to do this.

First I turned my text string into an array splitted on cr/lf then I changed the linq code into this:

string[] textFileContentArray = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Split(textFileContent, "\r\n");
 
XDocument doc2 =
  new XDocument(
    new XDeclaration("1.0", "iso-8859-1", string.Empty),
    new XElement("Article",
    new XElement("body",
        from s in textFileContentArray select new XElement("p", s))
 
  );
                                              
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