Question

I have built a little editor for resource files.

So I show the content of a resource item in a textarea.

<textarea cols="85" rows="12" id='EditItemTextArea'><%# Eval("Translation")%></textarea>

However, that content is shown as html symbols, so when I load < in the textarea and i look at the source, I see <
like this:

<textarea cols="85" rows="12" id='EditItemTextArea'>consumption.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;</textarea>

But in the textarea (in the browser) a < is shown, and when I save the content of the textarea, I read < and not <

Is there a way to solve this?

Answer 1

Have you tried HttpUtility.HtmlEncode (and HttpUtility.HtmlDecode to get a decoded HTML back)? Your code could look like the following:

<textarea cols="85" rows="12" id='EditItemTextArea' name='EditItemTextArea'><%# System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Eval("Translation").ToString())%></textarea>

Code-behind:

string html = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(base.Request["EditItemTextArea"]);