Question

I need to create a xml file which is to be converted to an excel file(.xls), and this means that the xml has a lot of meta info in it. Its easy to write all the contents into the xml file as a text file.

var sw = new FileInfo(tempReportFilePath).CreateText();
sw.WriteLine("meta info and other tags")

However, this method does not escape characters, and when the data contains ‘<‘ or ‘>’ or ‘&’ etc. the xml is rendered invalid and the .xls file does not open. I can easily do a replace ( ‘<‘ with ‘<‘ and so on), but for performance reasons, this method is not suitable.

The other alternative is to use xml text writer, but with a ton of meta info, it will mean writing a lot of tags in code. With sw.WriteLine(‘stuff’), I could simply put parts of meta info in one tag (as a string) and write them to file. Using xslt, the problem I faced was that tags required spaces. For example, for tabular data, the top row fields could have spaces.
How to go about creating a well formed xml file with a lot of meta info, and where the chareacters (‘<‘, ‘>’ etc) are excaped?

Answer 1

I used the WriteRaw method for writing the meta info tags. For the other data, which was required to be escaped, I used WriteString method.