how do i escape a slash character in a WPF binding path, or how to work around?

Question

I'm just learning WPF, and I gragged a table from a datasource onto a window which generated XAML for each column.

Some of those columns had names that caused the following:

<DataGridTextColumn x:Name="_Rev_UnitColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Rev/Unit}" Header="Rev/Unit" Width="SizeToHeader" />

This causes the column to come up blank (like me).

Have you looked at {} http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms744986.aspx — cordialgerm, Jul 16 '11 at 21:29

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

On MSDN there is an article on property paths which has a section on escape characters:

Inside indexers ([ ]), the caret character (^) escapes the next character.

You must escape (using XML entities) certain characters that are special to the XML language definition. Use & to escape the character "&". Use > to escape the end tag ">".

You must escape (using backslash \) characters that are special to the WPF XAML parser behavior for processing a markup extension.

Backslash (\) is the escape character itself.

The equal sign (=) separates property name from property value.

Comma (,) separates properties.

The right curly brace (}) is the end of a markup extension.

The slash is not listed here so i do not know if the backslash escape would work, but you can try.

(How exactly do you have a property name like that? It seems to be illegal both in XML and C#)

it comes from the name of a column name in a sql server view — Aaron Anodide, Jul 16 '11 at 23:57

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 17 '11 at 13:18

6

I (kind of randomly) tried:

<DataGridTextColumn x:Name="_Rev_UnitColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=[Rev/Unit]}" Header="Rev/Unit" Width="SizeToHeader" />

And the result was everything worked as I expected it to. Looking at it again, I guess H.B.'s MSDN quote tells me this. When I read that (originally on MSDN before I even posted this question, then again here) I just didn't understand what "Inside indexers --comma-- the caret character (^) escapes the next character" meant.

answered Jul 17 '11 at 13:18

Aaron Anodide

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I recently came across a similar problem. Just for completion's sake, the thing about comma and caret is that you can escape the comma if your column has it in its name, like so: `Binding={Binding Path=[Hello^, World]}`. – Arturo Torres Sánchez Mar 28 '19 at 14:56

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 30 '22 at 08:00

If you need to mask a path with : character, you can try using parenthesis char (path)

Example usage

<Style x:Key="DefaultButtonStyle" TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
    <Setter Property="materialDesign:ButtonAssist.CornerRadius" Value="24"/>
    <Setter Property="Template">
        <Setter.Value>
            <ControlTemplate>
                <Border CornerRadius="{Binding (materialDesign:ButtonAssist.CornerRadius), RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=Button}}"/>
            </ControlTemplate>
        </Setter.Value>
    </Setter>
</Style>

how do i escape a slash character in a WPF binding path, or how to work around?

3 Answers3

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