SyndicationItem Content < > is encoded to &lt; &gt

Question

I am adding some simple tags to my SyndicationItem Content object like

"<p>Hello World</p>"

but it is shown in the RSS feed as

"<p&gtHello World</p&gt"

I have tried to different ways to avoid this, but none works.

Answer 1

I have seen a number of solutions offered that work with old versions of .net here :

SyndicationFeed: Content as CDATA?

As well as a post processing solution here :

https://gist.github.com/davidwhitney/1027181

The first solution was not viable for me since we are using the latest version of .net, and the second looked like a lot of overhead for something so simple, so I ended up implementing this solution :

public class CDataWriter : XmlTextWriter
{
    public CDataWriter(TextWriter w) : base(w) { }

    public CDataWriter(Stream w, Encoding encoding) : base(w, encoding) { }

    public CDataWriter(string filename, Encoding encoding) : base(filename, encoding) { }

    public override void WriteString(string text)
    {
        if (text.Contains("<") && text.Contains(">"))
        {
            base.WriteCData(text);
        }
        else
        {
            base.WriteString(text);
        }
    }

}

And then to use the class :

public static class FeedToStringBuilder
{
    public static StringBuilder CDataOverwriteMethod(Rss20FeedFormatter formatter)
    {
        var buffer = new StringBuilder();
        var xmlWriterSettings = new XmlWriterSettings {Indent = true};
        using (var stream = new StringWriter(buffer))
        using (var writer = new CDataWriter(stream))
        using (var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(writer, xmlWriterSettings))
        {
            formatter.WriteTo(xmlWriter);
        }
        return buffer;
    }
}

Using in a controller:

public ActionResult RssFeed()
{
    SyndicationFeed feed;
    using (var dataContext = new DataContext())
    {
        string urlBase = $"{Request.Url.Scheme}://{Request.Url.Authority}{Request.ApplicationPath.TrimEnd('/')}/";
        feed = new PodcastFeed(dataContext, Server).GetFeed(urlBase);
    }

    var rss20FeedFormatter = new Rss20FeedFormatter(feed);
    rss20FeedFormatter.SerializeExtensionsAsAtom = false;

    var feedXml = FeedToStringBuilder.CDataOverwriteMethod(rss20FeedFormatter).ToString();
    return Content(feedXml, "text/xml");
}