"&" and Apostrophe shows up a symbols

Question

I am getting data from a web service end point and place it into a list in a for each loop. The service gets it's data from a Wordpress website.

 var list = new ItemList
      (
         (string)data.id.ToString(),
          (string)data.name,

          (string)subcategory

     );

I then print this on the XAML page. The code works fine in that it successfully gets the data from the service and prints it on the page of my windows 8 app.

However in (string)data.name,, which is the name of the items, if the name contains a "&" it shows up in the app as $#038;. Also if a item name contains a "'", apostrophe s, it shows up as ’.

EG. D & G, shows up as D $#038; G

The "&" and "'" show up as these weird symbols.

How do I get rid of these and fix it so that they render correctly in the app.

Answer 1

I'm going to take the risk of giving you a wrong hint, because I guess you're talking about a Windows 8 Store App (XAML), thus you don't have access to every class on .NET, but...

What about decoding HTML entities?

Check this HttpUtility method: HtmlUtility.HtmlDecode.

Check WebUtility.HtmlDecode, which is on System.dll, thus available for Windows 8 Store Apps.

You'll need to add a reference to System.Web on your Visual Studio project.

Answer 2

You can use WebUtility.HtmlDecode Method (String)

Or you can use if you don't want to add additional libraries.

public string Decode(string text)
{
    var replacements = new Dictionary<string, char> {
      { "&#8217;", ''' },
      // ...etc
    }

    var sb = new StringBuilder( text );

    foreach( var c in replacements.Keys ) {
      sb.Replace( c.ToString(), replacements[c] );
    }

    return sb.ToString();
}

Answer 3

It looks like the service is returning XML escaped entities. & means a character with a code of (decimal) 38 (which is &). ’ is similar and means a code of 8217 (which is ’).

You can decode these using System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(inputString), but that requires a reference to System.Web. If you don't want to or cannot reference that, you can try something like this:

var xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml("<x>" + inputString + "</x>");
var output = xml.InnerText;

Given Testing ’stuff" & things, it will return Testing ’stuff" & things.

I'd go with HtmlDecode() if you can, but absolutely try and avoid rolling your own decoder unless you have no other choice.