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How to serialize a string as CDATA in .NET

If you want to serialize an object that contains HTML data in one of its properties, you might want to make sure the HTML ends up in a CDATA section to prevent parsing errors.

Unfortunately, you can’t just put <![CDATA[ and ]]> around your HTML string. Also, the .NET framework does not provide an attribute that tells the serializer to make a string into a CDATA section.

However, you can declare a property of the type XMLCDataSection to get the desired result.

Here’s an example:

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
 
public MyTestClass
{
    MyTestClass()
    {
    }
 
    //Private variable that will contain the HTML:
    private string html;
 
    //This is the property that will be serialized as a CDATA section:
    public XmlCDataSection MyHtml
    {
        get
        {
            XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
            return doc.CreateCDataSection(html);
        }
        set
        {
            html = value.ToString();
        }
    }
}

This class contains a private variable html that contains the original HTML. A public property MyHtml that turns the contents of this variable into a CDATA section and vice versa. Now, you can make an instance of this class and serialize it to XML: 

MyTestClass test = new MyTestClass();
test.MyHtmlText = "&lt;b&gt;Hello, &lt;i&gt;world&lt;/i&gt;!&lt;/b&gt;";
 
XmlTextWriter xmlwriter = new XmlTextWriter("output.xml", Encoding.UTF8);
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyTestClass));
serializer.Serialize(xmlwriter, test);

Now you should have a file output.xml containing your CDATA section: 

<MyHtml>
    <![CDATA[
    <b>Hello, <i>world</i>!</b>
    ]]>
</MyHtml>

Posted: March 30th, 2008 under .NET.
Comments: 11

Comments

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Time: September 21, 2008, 9:02

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Comment from John Fowler
Time: October 2, 2008, 17:10

Thanks for the help on this. BTW: I don’t think the value.ToString() is correct. I think the setter should be:

set
{
html = value.Value;
}

Thanks again!

john…

Comment from Dan
Time: April 30, 2012, 0:53

I think this won’t work because of implicit conversion of assigning a string to XMLCDataSection data type. I tried it, it doesn’t compile.

test.MyHtmlText = “<b>Hello, <i>world</i…”

Thanks for the effort sharing though.

Comment from arjendk
Time: May 1, 2012, 13:47

Thanks for your comment Dan! Do note that this example is from a few years back and was made for .NET 2.0, so it might work differently on newer versions. Also note that you might have to HTML encode your HTML text as in the example.

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