Question

Is it possible in ASP.NET to take a string containing some HTML and make ASP.NET to parse it and create a Control for me? For example:

string rawHTML = '<table><td><td>Cell</td></tr></table>'; HTMLTable table = MagicClass.ParseTable(rawHTML); 

I know that this is a bad thing to do but I am in the unfortunate situation that this is really the only way I can achieve what I need (as I cannot modify this particular coworker’s code).

Also, I know that LiteralControl allows you to have a control with arbitrary HTML in it, but unfortunately I need to have them converted to proper control.

Unfortunately, HTMLTable does not support the InnerHTML property. I need to preserve the HTML tree exactly as it is, so I cannot put it into a <div> tag.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The closest I think you’ll get is Page.ParseControl, which is the ASP.NET parser. The downside is that the text you have is a LiteralControl, since it doesn’t have runat=’server’ on it – so you ‘ll do a very tiny bit of string manipulation beforehand.

In otherwords:

this.ParseControl('<table><tr><td>Cell</td></tr></table>') 

will produce:

Control  LiteralControl 

whereas:

this.ParseControl('<table runat=\'server\'><tr><td>Cell</td></tr></table>') 

will produce:

Control  HtmlTable   HtmlTableRow    HtmlTableCell     LiteralControl