C# method to check if character is markup or not

Question

Is there any method in the .NET framework which will return true if a given character is an XML markup character? That is, one of the characters, '"<>_&, and any others that may exist.

I understand I can go for a simple string search also, but was wondering if a built-in method exists which would not rely on manually typing the characters.

Answer 1

You may checkout the following KB article.

Answer 2

I'm not sure the term "XML markup character" (or rather a context-independent function for detecting these) makes much sense, since some of the characters you list only have special meaning depending on the context in which they appear (such as ' and ", which are normal characters if they appear outside of a tag).

Apart from that, you could always write your own such function:

bool IsMarkupCharacter(char ch)
{
    switch (ch)
    {
        case '\'':
        case '\"':
        case '<':
        case '>':
        case '&':
            return true;

        default:
            return false;
    }
}

Of course you would want to check this against the XML specification to check if it's truly complete. (I didn't include _ from your list, by the way; it is not special to XML in any way, AFAIK.)