InnerXML and InnerText BOTH don't work right

[kben]

I'm trying to get some text into an XMLElement that may or may not
contain markup, and it may or may not contain characters that need
escaping. I want the special characters escaped, but I want to preserve
the markup. This is so a user can enter some text with (xml
compatible) HTML tags and have it render properly (via XSLT) without
having to know about escaping the ampersand. For example, I want to
take the text:

"Nice t-shirt <p/> Cool & Stylish"

And put it in an element as such:

<ItemDescription>
Nice t-shirt <p/> Cool &amp; Stylish
</ItemDescription>

InnerXML chokes on the ampersand, and innerText escapes the tags. How
can I do this? I'm "manually" escaping the ampersand (and
apostrophies) in my code right now, and using innerXML, but it seems
like this must be a very common thing to want to do, and doing it
manually is error prone and more complex than it needs to be,
especially if the text might also have < or > that are not parts of
tags. I can't find any other properties on XMLElement that will do
this. There must be a way to do it directly.

--Kyle Bennett

[Robbe Morris [C# MVP]]

CDATA tags

--
2005 Microsoft MVP C#
Robbe Morris
http://www.robbemorris.com
http://www.masterado.net/home/listings.aspx

"kben" <th*****************@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:11*********************@z14g2000cwz.googlegro ups.com...

I'm trying to get some text into an XMLElement that may or may not
contain markup, and it may or may not contain characters that need
escaping. I want the special characters escaped, but I want to preserve
the markup. This is so a user can enter some text with (xml
compatible) HTML tags and have it render properly (via XSLT) without
having to know about escaping the ampersand. For example, I want to
take the text:

"Nice t-shirt <p/> Cool & Stylish"

And put it in an element as such:

<ItemDescription>
Nice t-shirt <p/> Cool &amp; Stylish
</ItemDescription>

InnerXML chokes on the ampersand, and innerText escapes the tags. How
can I do this? I'm "manually" escaping the ampersand (and
apostrophies) in my code right now, and using innerXML, but it seems
like this must be a very common thing to want to do, and doing it
manually is error prone and more complex than it needs to be,
especially if the text might also have < or > that are not parts of
tags. I can't find any other properties on XMLElement that will do
this. There must be a way to do it directly.

--Kyle Bennett

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

kben wrote:

I'm trying to get some text into an XMLElement that may or may not
contain markup, and it may or may not contain characters that need
escaping.
Sorry, but that's oxymoron. Text is text and markup is markup, you can't
have either-text-or-markup.
"Nice t-shirt <p/> Cool & Stylish"
This is looks like malformed XML or HTML. Whoever generates it - you
better get it fixed.
InnerXML chokes on the ampersand, and innerText escapes the tags.

That's by design. InnerXML expects XML and InnerText - text.
You can try reading such malformed XML via SgmlReader to get it
wellformed and then appends to XmlElement as XML.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com