Question

I’m reading XML data from a varchar column in a SQL db, into a linq to sql XElement belonging to an XDocument.

When I execute the XDocument.Save method, the XML is written to file but includes the escape characters. For example, ">" is changed to "&gt".

Is there an easy way to prevent this?

Answer 1

First, there seems to be no reason to prevent it. Like kenny mentioned, unless special characters are XML encoded, no parser would be able to parse produced XML (because ‘<‘ or ‘>’ characters means a lot for that parser). Second, when your parser decodes XML (e.g. you call XElement.Value), all special characters will be converted back to what they originally were. Finally, if you want to keep the original string (e.g. for purposes other than XML parsing), you can use CDATA, which in case of Linq2XML is represented by XCData class.

EDIT: As Rob pointed out, I might have gotten it wrong. If the point is to save add existing XML to a document, without special characters appear, use the following code:

XDocument document = new XDocument();
var xmlFromDb = "<xml>content</xml>";
using (var stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xmlFromDb))) 
{
     using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream)) {
          reader.MoveToContent();
          document.Add(XElement.ReadFrom(reader));
     }
}