Question

I have a string that has a format like this:
<b>*GTPersonnel</b><table border=1><tr><td>&#115;&#115;&#50;&#49;&#49;&#49;</td></tr></table>

I want to process those data that is between <td> tags and replace each occurrence of &#Blah; with its equal character so for example in s I want it to be replaced by just the character a because 115 is the character code for that.

I can loop through the whole string, find &# index, find ; index, read the character in between and find the Character for that code… well it is a bit algorithmic… I was wondering if there are better things with .NET that I can utilize for this puprpose.

Answer 1

If you use XHTML you can simple modify the EntityHandling property in XmlTextReader object to tell it to handle character entities automatically:

XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader( "temp.xml" );
reader.EntityHandling = EntityHandling.ExpandCharEntities;

Then you can read your file with XmlTextReader or with the help of LINQ to XML. For example, if you have xml file like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<document>
    <td>&#115;&#115;&#50;&#49;&#49;&#49;</td>
</document>

And you write the code below above and next couple of strings:

while ( reader.Read() )
    if ( reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Text )
        Console.WriteLine( reader.Value );

You get ss2111 value on your console window.