Question

I’ve searched around and have not been able to find an good solution. I have a custom extension to a PlaceHolder control that will contain expressions that I would like to take the string output of without having to call control.Render(), since that call automatically writes the contents out to the page.

Does anybody know how to get the would be rendered content into a string and prevent the page from containing it?

Answer 1

The often-regurgitated, slightly dated code for this goes something like:

public string RenderControl(Control ctrl) 
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    StringWriter tw = new StringWriter(sb);
    HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(tw);

    ctrl.RenderControl(hw);
    return sb.ToString();
}