Question

I have some code which returns InnerXML for a XMLNode.

The node can contain just some text (with HTML) or XML.

For example:

<XMLNode>     Here is some &lt;strong&gt;HTML&lt;/strong&gt; <XMLNode> 

or

<XMLNode>     <XMLContent>Here is some content</XMLContnet> </XMLNode> 

if I get the InnerXML for <XmlNode> the HTML tags are returned as XML entities.

I cannot use InnerText because I need to be able to get the XML contents. So all I really need is a way to un-escape the HTML tags, because I can detect if it’s XML or not and act accordingly.

I guess I could use HTMLDecode, but will this decode all the XML encoded entities?

Update: I guess I’m rambling a bit above so here is a clarified scenario:

I have a XML document that looks like this:

<content id='1'>     <data>&lt;p&gt;A Test&lt;/p&gt;</data> </content id='2'> <content>     <data>         <dataitem>A test</dataitem>     </data> </content> 

If I do:

XmlNode xn1 = document.SelectSingleNode('/content[@id=1]/data'); XmlNode xn2 = document.SelectSingleNode('/content[@id=2]/data');  Console.WriteLine(xn1.InnerXml); Console.WriteLine(xn2.InnerXml);     

xn1 will return

 <p>A Test</p> 

xn2 will return <dataitem>A test</dataitem>

I am already checking to see if what is returned is XML (in the case of xn2) so all I need to do is un-escape the < etc in xn1.

HTMLDecode does this, but I’m not sure it would work for everything. So the question remains would HTMLDecode handle all the possible entities or is there a class somewhere that will do it for me.

Answer 1

I think Tomalak is on the right track, but I’d write the code a little differently:

        XmlNode xn = document.SelectSingleNode('/content[@id=1]/data');         if (xn.ChildNodes.Count != 1)         {             throw new InvalidOperationException('I don't know what to do if there's not exactly one child node.');         }         XmlNode child = xn.ChildNodes[0];         switch (child.NodeType)         {             case XmlNodeType.Element:                 Console.WriteLine(xn.InnerXml);                 break;             case XmlNodeType.Text:                 Console.WriteLine(xn.Value);                 break;             default:                 throw new InvalidOperationException('I can only handle elements and text nodes.');         } 

This code makes a lot of your implicit assumptions explicit, and when you encounter data that’s not in the form you expect, it will tell you why it failed.