Micah
Micah

Reputation: 116050

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

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;

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

However the actionlink outputs the actual text "&hellip;" 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?

Upvotes: 42

Views: 28200

Answers (5)

tvanfosson
tvanfosson

Reputation: 532435

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&hellip;"), "Posts", ...)

Upvotes: 81

Pavel Shkleinik
Pavel Shkleinik

Reputation: 6347

Check out this:

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

Upvotes: 6

oogway
oogway

Reputation: 111

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("&amp;"), "Index", "Home")

Upvotes: 10

Sam
Sam

Reputation: 1834

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

Eg:

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

Annoying though

Upvotes: 4

bobince
bobince

Reputation: 536339

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.

Upvotes: 7

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