Question

I’m imagining that this will come down to personal preference but which way would you go?

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();  foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId)) {     markup.Append(String.Format('<div class=\'captionedImage\'><img src=\'{0}\' width=\'150\' alt=\'{1}\'/><p>{1}</p></div>', image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption)); }  LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString(); 

Vs.

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();  foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId)) {     markup.Append(String.Format(@'<div class=''captionedImage''><img src=''{0}'' width=''150'' alt=''{1}''/><p>{1}</p></div>', image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption)); }  LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString(); 

Or should I not be doing this at all and using the HtmlTextWriter class instead?

EDIT: Some really good suggestions here. We are on 2.0 framework so LINQ is not available

Answer 1

Another vote for ‘AppendFormat’. Also, for the sake of the server code I might put up with single quotes here to avoid the need to escape anything:

StringBuilder markup = new StringBuilder();  foreach (SearchResult image in Search.GetImages(componentId)) {     markup.AppendFormat(         '<div class='captionedImage'><img src='{0}' width='150' alt='{1}'/><p>{1}</p></div>',          image.Resolutions[0].Uri, image.Caption       ); }  LiteralMarkup.Text = markup.ToString(); 

Finally, you may also want an additional check in there somewhere to prevent html/xss injection.

Another option is to encapsulate your image in a class:

public class CaptionedHtmlImage {       public Uri src {get; set;};     public string Caption {get; set;}      CaptionedHtmlImage(Uri src, string Caption)     {         this.src = src;         this.Caption = Caption;     }      public override string ToString()     {         return String.Format(             '<div class='captionedImage'><img src='{0}' width='150' alt='{1}'/><p>{1}</p></div>'             src.ToString(), Caption           );     } } 

This has the advantage of making it easy to re-use and add features to the concept over time. To get real fancy you can turn that class into a usercontrol.