Question

I’m trying to get a newline into a text node using XText from the Linq XML namespace.

I have a string which contains newline characters however I need to work out how to convert these to entity characters (i.e. 
) rather than just having them appear in the XML as new lines.

XElement element = new XElement( "NodeName" );
...

string example = "This is a string\nWith new lines in it\n";

element.Add( new XText( example ) );

The XElement is then written out using an XmlTextWriter which results in the file containing the newline rather than an entity replacement.

Has anyone come across this problem and found a solution?

---

EDIT:

The problem manifests itself when I load the XML into EXCEL which doesn’t seem to like the newline character but which accepts the entity replacement. The result is that newlines aren’t showing in EXCEL unless I replace them with 


Nick.

Answer 1

Cheating:

        XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
        settings.Indent = true;
        settings.CheckCharacters = false;
        settings.NewLineChars = "
";
        XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(..., settings);
        element.WriteTo(writer);
        writer.Flush();

UPDATE:

Complete program

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;


namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        XElement element = new XElement( "NodeName" );
        string example = "This is a string\nWith new lines in it\n";
        element.Add( new XText( example ) );

        XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
        settings.Indent = true;
        settings.CheckCharacters = false;
        settings.NewLineChars = "
";
        XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(Console.Out, settings);
        element.WriteTo(writer);
        writer.Flush();
    }
}
}

OUTPUT:

C:\Users\...\\ConsoleApplication1\bin\Release>ConsoleApplication1.exe
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ibm850"?>&#10;<NodeName>This is a string&#10;With new lines in it&#10;</NodeName>