Decoding all HTML Entities

c# asp.net html-entities
Matthew picture Matthew · Dec 1, 2011 · Viewed 36k times · Source

I'm looking for some function that will decode a good amount of HTML entities.

Reason is I am working on some code to take HTML content and turning it into plain text, the issue that I have is a lot of entities do not get converted using HttpUtility.HtmlDecode.

Some examples of entities I'm concerned about are  , &, ©.

This is for .net 3.5.

Answer

Pavel Donchev picture Pavel Donchev · Dec 1, 2011

Then maybe you will need the HttpUtility.HtmlDecode?. It should work, you just need to add a reference to System.Web. At least this was the way in .Net Framework < 4.

For example the following code:

MessageBox.Show(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("&amp;&copy;"));

Worked and the output was as expected (ampersand and copyright symbol). Are you sure the problem is within HtmlDecode and not something else?

UPDATE: Another class capable of doing the job, WebUtility (again HtmlDecode method) came in the newer versions of .Net. However, there seem to be some problems with it. See the HttpUtility vs. WebUtility question.

Related questions

How to get the URL of the current page in C#

Can anyone help out me in getting the URL of the current working page of ASP.NET in C#?

Read More
How do you set the Content-Type header for an HttpClient request?

I'm trying to set the Content-Type header of an HttpClient object as required by an API I am calling. I tried setting the Content-Type like below: using (var httpClient = new HttpClient()) { httpClient.BaseAddress = new Uri("http://example.com/"); httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.…

Read More
The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel

We are unable to connect to an HTTPS server using WebRequest because of this error message: The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel. We know that the server doesn't have a valid HTTPS certificate with the …

Read More