How to decode string to XML string in C#

Question

I have a string (from a CDATA element) that contains description of XML. I need to decode this string into a new string that displays the characters correctly using C#

Existing String:

&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?&gt;&lt;myreport xmlns="http://test.com/rules/client"&gt;&lt;admin&gt;&lt;ordernumber&gt;123&lt;/ordernumber&gt;&lt;state&gt;NY&lt;/state&gt;&lt;/report&gt;&lt;/myreport&gt;

String Wanted:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<myreport xmlns="http://test.com/rules/client">
<admin><ordernumber>123</ordernumber><state>NY</state></report></myreport>

@Jeff Mercado: was using linqpad to write an answer when i saw the string is invalid and `HtmlDecode` won't work as it accepts `string`. was merley pointing out that our OP needs to escape `"` too. — naveen, Jul 20 '11 at 05:19

Kirill Polishchuk · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-27T23:11:28.730

50

HttpUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Web
WebUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Net

edited Jun 27 '19 at 23:11

answered Jul 20 '11 at 05:00

Kirill Polishchuk

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score 45 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 28 '14 at 16:06

45

You can use System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode instead of HttpUtility.HtmlDecode

Useful if you don't want System.Web reference and prefer System.Net instead.

edited Oct 28 '14 at 16:06

Wojciech

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answered Jun 16 '14 at 12:19

matabares

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2

Thanks! This is really handy, as I want to target the .NET 4.0 Client Profile, but referencing System.Web would require me to target the full .NET 4.0 profile. – Mal Ross Sep 25 '15 at 13:18

Wernight · Answer 3 · 2012-08-09T09:23:42.900

6

As Kirill and msarchet said, you can use HttpUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Web. It escapes pretty much anything correctly.

If you don't want to reference System.Web you might use some trick which supports all XML escaping but not HTML-specific escaping like é:

public static string XmlDecode(string value) {
    var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml("<root>" + value + "</root>");
    return xmlDoc.InnerText;
}

You could also use a RegEx or simple string.Replace but it would only support basic XML escaping. Things like А or é are examples that would be harder to support.

edited Aug 09 '12 at 09:23

answered Aug 09 '12 at 09:18

Wernight

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I wouldn't parse XML/HTML with RegEx: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/ – cederlof Oct 15 '13 at 13:40
(I liked the XmlDocument-method though) +1 – cederlof Oct 15 '13 at 13:53

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Nov 12 '18 at 14:28

1

HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(xmlString) will solve this issue

edited Nov 12 '18 at 14:28

Jon Grant

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answered Apr 05 '17 at 06:12

Sharthak Ghosh

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 24 '15 at 08:10

0

You can use HTML.Raw. That way the markup is not encoded.

answered Feb 24 '15 at 08:10

Andrei S

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Can you provide some sample code to better explain your answer? – winhowes Feb 24 '15 at 08:18

score -1 · Answer 6 · answered May 25 '15 at 03:16

-1

You just need to replace the scaped characters with their originals.

string stringWanted= existingString.Replace("&lt;", "<")
                                                   .Replace("&amp;", "&")
                                                   .Replace("&gt;", ">")
                                                   .Replace("&quot;", "\"")
                                                   .Replace("&apos;", "'");

answered May 25 '15 at 03:16

Ghasem

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Well that is very strange. I've just [produced an example](https://dotnetfiddle.net/vRfBTE) that I was expecting to demonstrate the problem, and it works precisely as desired. What makes it strange is that I *know* this exact situation is responsible for an XML parsing error in a codebase I maintain that I fixed *yesterday*. At least, I think it's exactly the same. I'll cancel the downvote and remove my original comment until I get a chance to check. – Tom W Jan 09 '16 at 11:00

score -2 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 19 '15 at 00:58

You might also consider the static parse method from XDocument. I'm not sure how it compares to others mentioned here, but it seems to parse these strings well.

Once you get the resulting XDocument, you could turn around with ToString to get the string back:

string parsedString = XDocument.Parse("<My XML />").ToString();

How to decode string to XML string in C#

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