Question

If you are just inserting information on a page, what are the differences, if any, between:

<%#Variable%>

and

<%=Variable%>

I’ve always used the # but a co-worker asked me today and I realized that, as far as I know, they are the same. Surely, though, there must be some difference or why would MS provide both?

Answer 1

<%=Variable%>

is legacy from Classic ASP. Its short for

<% Response.Write(Variable) %>.

A new variation on that is

<%:Variable%>

which handles encoding it to HTML entities.

<%#Variable%>

is used in data binding.