How to decode string to XML string in C#

I have a string (from a CDATA element) that contains description of XML. I need to decode this string into a new string that displays the characters correctly using C#

Existing String:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><myreport xmlns="http://test.com/rules/client"><admin><ordernumber>123</ordernumber><state>NY</state></report></myreport>

String Wanted:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<myreport xmlns="http://test.com/rul开发者_Python百科es/client">
<admin><ordernumber>123</ordernumber><state>NY</state></report></myreport>

1. HttpUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Web
2. WebUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Net

You can use System.Net.WebUtility.HtmlDecode instead of HttpUtility.HtmlDecode

Useful if you don't want System.Web reference and prefer System.Net instead.

As Kirill and msarchet said, you can use HttpUtility.HtmlDecode from System.Web. It escapes pretty much anything correctly.

If you don't want to reference System.Web you might use some trick which supports all XML escaping but not HTML-specific escaping like é:

public static string XmlDecode(string value) {
    var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.LoadXml("<root>" + value + "</root>");
    return xmlDoc.InnerText;
}

You could also use a RegEx or simple string.Replace but it would only support basic XML escaping. Things like А or é are examples that would be harder to support.

HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(xmlString) will solve this issue

You can use HTML.Raw. That way the markup is not encoded.

You just need to replace the scaped characters with their originals.

string stringWanted= existingString.Replace("&lt;", "<")
                                                   .Replace("&amp;", "&")
                                                   .Replace("&gt;", ">")
                                                   .Replace("&quot;", "\"")
                                                   .Replace("&apos;", "'");

You might also consider the static parse method from XDocument. I'm not sure how it compares to others mentioned here, but it seems to parse these strings well.

Once you get the resulting XDocument, you could turn around with ToString to get the string back:

string parsedString = XDocument.Parse("<My XML />").ToString();