Simple text to HTML conversion

Question

I have a very simple asp:textbox with the multiline attribute enabled. I then accept just text, with no markup, from the textbox. Is there a comm

Answer 1

I know this is old, but I couldn't find anything better after some searching, so here is what I'm using:

public static string TextToHtml(string text)
{
    text = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(text);
    text = text.Replace("\r\n", "\r");
    text = text.Replace("\n", "\r");
    text = text.Replace("\r", "
\r\n");
    text = text.Replace("  ", "  ");
    return text;
}

If you can't use HttpUtility for some reason, then you'll have to do the HTML encoding some other way, and there are lots of minor details to worry about (not just <>&).

HtmlEncode only handles the special characters for you, so after that I convert any combo of carriage-return and/or line-feed to a BR tag, and any double-spaces to a single-space plus a NBSP.

Optionally you could use a PRE tag for the last part, like so:

public static string TextToHtml(string text)
{
    text = "
" + HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(text) + "
";
    return text;
}