Error while rendering '&' in telerik html textbox

Question

How can I handle an ampersand ("&") character in a Telerik HTML textbox? While rendering, it's giving me an error. Also, does anybody know about any other character that may cause errors in an HTML textbox?

Answer 1

Ampersand is a special character in HTML that specifies the start of an escape sequence (so you can do something like © to get a copyright symbol, etc.). If you want to display an ampersand you have to escape it. So if you replace all ampersands with &, that should take care of the error.

However, if there were ampersands in your input that were already escaped - like maybe your data had © - you wouldn't want to escape that ampersand. But if your data won't have any of these ampersands, a simple replace should be fine.

You also need to replace greater than and less than symbols (> and <) with > and < respectively.

Telerik talks about these limitations/issues on this page http://www.telerik.com/help/reporting/report-items-html-text-box.html

Also according to the HTML specification (and the general XML specification as well) the "&", "<" and ">" characters are considered special (markup delimiters), so they need to be encoded in order to be treated as regular text. For example the "&" character can be escaped with the "&" entity. More information on the subject you can find in this w3.org article.