How to render decoded HTML in a (i.e. a <br>) in GridView cell

Question

I'm binding a GridView to an LINQ query. Some of the fields in the objects created by the LINQ statement are strings, and need to contain new lines.

Apparently, GridView HTML-encodes everything in each cell, so I can't insert a <br /> to create a new line within a cell.

How do I tell GridView not to HTML encode the contents of cells?

Maybe I should use a different control instead?

Answer 1

What about setting the HtmlEncode property to false? To me, this is much simpler.

<asp:BoundField DataField="MyColumn" HtmlEncode="False" />

Answer 2

Can you subscribe to the RowDataBound event? If you can, you can run:

if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
{
  string decodedText = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(e.Row.Cells[0].Text);
  e.Row.Cells[0].Text = decodedText;
}

Answer 3

protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{

    for (int i = 0; i < e.Row.Cells.Count; i++)
    {
        if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
        {
            string decodedText = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(e.Row.Cells[i].Text);
            e.Row.Cells[i].Text = decodedText;
        }
    }
}