Question

I am getting a string of ‘xml’ that contains some content that is unescaped. Here is a trivial example:

<link text="This is some text with "potentially" some quoted text in it." linktype="external" anchor="" target="" />

The problem I have is when you try to convert the above as a string using XmlDocument.LoadXml(), LoadXml() throws an exception because of the lack of escaping on the inner quotes for the content held by attribute ‘text’. Is there a relatively painless way to escape the content specifically? Or am I just going to have to parse it/escape it/rebuild it myself?

i’m not generating this text, i just get it from another process in a string like this:

"<link text="This is some text with "potentially" some quoted text in it." linktype="external" anchor="" target="" />"

Answer 1

You need to use the html character encoding where " is "

But since your input is a malformed xml text you have to find a way to parse that text and replace the quotes with their encoded translation. Maybe some regex parsing..

Please consider this just a creative way to make the job. I know it’s dirty but it will work in most cases:

 private static string XmlEncodeQuotes(string target) {

        string result = string.Empty;
        for (int i = 0; i < target.Length; i++)
        {
            if (target[i] == '"')
            {
                if (target[i - 1] != '=')
                    if (!Regex.IsMatch(target.Substring(i), @"^""\s[a-zA-Z]+="""))
                    {
                        result += "&quot;";
                        continue;
                    }
            }
            result += target[i];
        }
        return result;
    }