Converting contents of HtmlTextWriter to a string

.net asp.net htmltextwriter
Tony_Henrich picture Tony_Henrich · Jun 7, 2010 · Viewed 14k times · Source

I have a third party tool that creates an img tag through code using HtmlTextWriter's RenderBeginTag, RenderEndTag & AddAttribute methods. I want to get the resulting HTML into a string. I tried the reflection method mentioned here but I get a error "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Web.HttpWriter' to type 'System.IO.StringWriter". The InnerWriter type of the HtmlTextWriter is of type HttpWriter.

Any ideas on how to copy the output html into a string?

Addition: code from third party control

protected override void Render( HtmlTextWriter output )
  {
  .....
  output.AddAttribute( HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Src, src );
  output.RenderBeginTag( HtmlTextWriterTag.Img );
  output.RenderEndTag();
                <-- What is the HTML now? Maybe look in OnPreRenderComplete event?

  }

Answer

Brian Mains picture Brian Mains · Jun 7, 2010 
StringWriter w = new StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter h = new HtmlTextWriter(w);

ctl.RenderControl(h);

return w.ToString();

Obviously, you got to close the connections properly. But it's roughly this; I had done this for unit testing, but I apologize, I don't have the exact code in front of me at the moment.

HTH.

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