HTMLencode HTMLdecode

Question

I have a text area and I want to store the text entered by user in database with html formatting like paragraph break, numbered list. I am using HTMLencode and HTMLdecode fo

Answer 1

That's not what HtmlEncode and HtmlDecode do. Not even close.

Those methods are for "escaping" HTML. < becomes <, > becomes >, and so on. You use these to escape user entered input in order to avoid Cross-Site Scripting attacks and related issues.

If you want to be able to take plain-text input and transform it into HTML, consider a formatting tool like Markdown (I believe that Stack Overflow uses MarkdownSharp).

If all you want are line breaks, you can use text.Replace("\r\n", "
"), but handling more complex structures like ordered lists is difficult, and there are already existing tools to handle it.