Escape Syntax Madness

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Have you ever used VBA to generate C# code that generates XML that includes quotes in attribute values? I did so in a somewhat obscure situation, which involved manipulating an XML file using rules laid down in an Excel sheet.

Here's a simplified demo. To have an XML attribut named "project" with a value like:

"WebEdit"

... you need:

project=""WebEdit""

... which can be generated like this:

Console.WriteLine("project=\""WebEdit"\"");

... which can be generated like this:

Debug.Print "Console.WriteLine(""project=\"""WebEdit"\"""");"

The combination of various escape methods drove me nuts. I took a pass on properly escaping the quotes in this document's HTML (except for &).