How do I stop XElement.Save from escaping characters?

Question

I'm populating an XElement with information and writing it to an xml file using the XElement.Save(path) method. At some point, certain characters in the resulting file are being escaped - for example, > becomes >.

This behaviour is unacceptable, since I need to store information in the XML that includes the > character as part of a password. How can I write the 'raw' content of my XElement object to XML without having these escaped?

Answer 1

The XML specification usually allows > to appear unescaped. XDocument plays it safe and escapes it although it appears in places where the escaping is not strictly required.

You can do a replace on the generated XML. Be aware per http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#syntax, if this results in any ]]> sequences, the XML will not conform to the XML specification. Moreover, XDocument.Parse will actually reject such XML with the error "']]>' is not allowed in character data.".

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse("<test>Test&gt;Data</test>");
// Don't use this if it could result in any ]]> sequences!
string s = doc.ToString().Replace("&gt;", ">");
System.IO.File.WriteAllText(@"c:\path\test.xml", s);

In consideration that any spec-compliant XML parser must support >, I'd highly recommend fixing the code that is processing the XML output of your program.

Answer 2

Lack of this behavior is unacceptable.

A standalone unescaped > is invalid XML.
XElement is designed to produce valid XML.

If you want to get the unescaped content of the element, use the Value property.