How would I tell a browser to render a string, not display it

Question

I have this extension method I created and it returns a string of all the categories in my database as hyperlinks. Great!

@Html.MyMenu()

The problem is that the links are being displayed as text and not rendered as hyperlinks.

When viewing the source code I see:

<div id="menucontainer">

                &lt;a href=&quot;/Anuncio/Electronics&quot;&gt;Electronics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/Anuncio/Clothes&quot;&gt;Clothes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/Anuncio/Domestic&quot;&gt;Domestic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/Anuncio/Garden&quot;&gt;Garden&lt;/a&gt;

            </div>

I think I may be wrong but I remember that in MVC2 (using the default view engine) you had:

<%: this is rendered, right? %>

Or am I mistaken? Anyways, I'm using MVC3 and the Razor engine. Thanks a lot for your help guys. I'm really enjoying learning as much as I can about this.

Please let me know if you need to see the code in the View. Thanks! — , Dec 14 '10 at 13:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 09:58

2

Razor escapes HTML by default.

To avoid that, please do something like this:

Writing/outputting HTML strings unescaped

edited May 23 '17 at 09:58

Community

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answered Dec 14 '10 at 13:12

rsenna

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Thanks, this helped me solve my problem. Here's my solution: @(new HtmlString(@Html.MyMenu())) – Dec 14 '10 at 13:19
But you could also make `Html.MyMenu()` return a `HtmlString`! I guess it would be better... Unless you need it to return a regular string (for reusing it somewhere else, for instance). – rsenna Dec 14 '10 at 13:22

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 14 '10 at 13:17

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In RC2 a new method called @HTml.Raw should to this.

Or you can change MyMenu to return HtmlString or MvcString rather than just string.

answered Dec 14 '10 at 13:17

Zote

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I can't find this method on MSDN and Google returns no results. Can you share a link? – Dec 14 '10 at 13:22
@sergio sure! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4281424/asp-net-mvc-razor-output-html-string-non-escaped/4282073#4282073 – Zote Dec 15 '10 at 16:16

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 14 '10 at 13:12

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well your extension method should be returning an MvcHtmlString in order to properly display on your page using the <%: %> If it returns a string, all angle brackets and other html special characters will be html-encoded.

answered Dec 14 '10 at 13:12

Peter Perháč

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I only mentioned the brackets to illustrate what I'm trying to accomplish. You can't use the brackets of MVC2 on the Razor engine. – Dec 14 '10 at 13:16

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 14 '10 at 17:44

RC2 supports @Html.Raw() to output raw HTML

From Scott Guthrie's RC2 anouncement

With RC2 we are adding a Html.Raw() helper method that you can use to explicitly indicate that you do not want to HTML encode your output, and instead want to render the content “as-is”

How would I tell a browser to render a string, not display it

4 Answers4