How do I bypass the HTML encoding when using Html.ActionLink in Mvc?

Question

Whenever I use Html.ActionLink it always Html encodes my display string. For instance I want my link to look like this:

<a href="/posts/422/My-Post-Title-Here">More&hellip;</a>

it outputs like this: More…

&hellip is "..." incase you were wondering.

However the actionlink outputs the actual text "…" as the link text. I have the same problem with if I want to output this:

<a href="/posts/422/My-Post-Title-Here"><em>My-Post-Title-Here</em></a>

I wind up with: <em>My-Post-Title-Here</em>

Any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

It looks like ActionLink always uses calls HttpUtility.Encode on the link text. You could use UrlHelper to generate the href and build the anchor tag yourself.

<a href='@Url.Action("Posts", ...)'>More&hellip;</a>

Alternatively you can "decode" the string you pass to ActionLink. Constructing the link in HTML seems to be slightly more readable (to me) - especially in Razor. Below is the equivalent for comparison.

@Html.ActionLink(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("More…"), "Posts", ...)

Answer 2

The answer given by Sam is actually correct and I used it in my solution so I have therefore tried it myself. You may want to remove the extra parenthesis so it becomes something like this:

@Html.ActionLink(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode("&"), "Index", "Home")

Answer 3

Alternatively, just use a plain Unicode ellipsis character \u2026 and let MVC worry about how to encode it. Unless there's some particularly compelling reason you'd specifically need a hellip entity reference as opposed to a character reference or just including the character as simple UTF-8 bytes.

Alternative alternatively: just use three periods. The ellipsis (U+2026) is a compatibility character, only included to round-trip to pre-Unicode encodings. It gets you very little compared to simple dots.

Answer 4

Check out this:

  <p>Some text   @(new HtmlString(stringToPaste)) </p>

Answer 5

Decode it before passing the value in. Just had this same issue (different characters) and it works fine:

Eg:

@Html.ActionLink(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(_("&")), "Index", "Home")

Annoying though