Strings inside XML Tags

[Roger Helliwell]

I'm placing the contents of numerous TextBoxes into an XML file.
However, problems occur when the user enters any 'special' characters
in the text boxes. For example, punctuation marks such as < > & ' "

And vice versa... if there are &lt; &gt; &amp; tags within the XML, is
there an easy way to convert these back to unicode characters for
display? (There seems to be hundreds of &xxxx; codes listed in the
specs.)

Is there a general purpose method somewhere that does this kind of
conversion? Thanks.

Roger

[fritz]

Roger Helliwell wrote:

I'm placing the contents of numerous TextBoxes into an XML file.
However, problems occur when the user enters any 'special' characters
in the text boxes. For example, punctuation marks such as < > & ' "

And vice versa... if there are &lt; &gt; &amp; tags within the XML, is
there an easy way to convert these back to unicode characters for
display? (There seems to be hundreds of &xxxx; codes listed in the
specs.)

Is there a general purpose method somewhere that does this kind of
conversion? Thanks.

Roger

a CDATA section should do it. You can store everything including the
terminator of the CDATA section.

[Simon Smith]

On 23 Jul 2004 03:14, Roger Helliwell wrote:

I'm placing the contents of numerous TextBoxes into an XML file.
However, problems occur when the user enters any 'special' characters
in the text boxes. For example, punctuation marks such as < > & ' "

And vice versa... if there are < > & tags within the XML, is
there an easy way to convert these back to unicode characters for
display? (There seems to be hundreds of &xxxx; codes listed in the
specs.)

Is there a general purpose method somewhere that does this kind of
conversion? Thanks.

Roger

If you set the XmlNode.InnerText property to a string containing these
characters it will convert them (e.g. > to &gt;) and convert back when
you read it out. If you set it's InnerXml property then it won't do that
and you then get problems.

--
Simon Smith
simon dot s at ghytred dot com
www.ghytred.com/NewsLook - NNTP Client for Outlook

[Roger Helliwell]

On 23 Jul 2004 07:08:27 +0100 in
microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp, Simon Smith
<gh*****@community.nospam> wrote:

If you set the XmlNode.InnerText property to a string containing these
characters it will convert them (e.g. > to &gt;) and convert back when
you read it out. If you set it's InnerXml property then it won't do that
and you then get problems.

When I read an XML file (using node.InnerText), the special characters
get converted. When I'm saving the XML though, no conversions are
being performed. I'm using WriteElementString() as below:

XmlTextWriter tw = new XmlTextWriter("myalbums.xml", null);
tw.WriteStartElement("albumlist");

foreach (CAlbum album in collection) {
tw.WriteStartElement("album");
tw.WriteElementString("title", album.Title); // special
characters will get saved in the XML
tw.WriteElementString("artist", album.Artist);
tw.WriteElementString("year", album.Year.ToString() );
tw.WriteElementString("duration", album.Duration.ToString() );
tw.WriteEndElement();
}
tw.WriteEndElement();

Any further ideas? Thanks.
Roger

[Roger Helliwell]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 17:16:51 GMT in
microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp, Roger Helliwell
<rh********@telus.net> wrote:

XmlTextWriter tw = new XmlTextWriter("myalbums.xml", null);
tw.WriteStartElement("albumlist");

foreach (CAlbum album in collection) {
tw.WriteStartElement("album");
tw.WriteElementString("title", album.Title); // special
characters will get saved in the XML
tw.WriteElementString("artist", album.Artist);
tw.WriteElementString("year", album.Year.ToString() );
tw.WriteElementString("duration", album.Duration.ToString() );
tw.WriteEndElement();
}
tw.WriteEndElement();

I see the problem now. WriteElementString() doesn't convert special
characters to character entities.
WriteString() does.

Roger