"Razor encodes everything by default"

Question

I've read What is an MvcHtmlString and when should I use it? I did not understand the whole answer of Torbjörn Nomell. He wrote that "razor encodes everything by default." What does this mean?

Answer 1

He means that Razor will HTML-encode special characters. e.g.:

@{
    var test = "<br>";
}

@test

Will yield:

<br>

If you want to write out the raw HTML (e.g. you are trying to render rich text with HTML formatting) you need to use Html.Raw:

@Html.Raw(test);

Yields:

<br>