How to write quotes (" or ') and quoted strings to a Razor view

Question

I have a bunch of constants to be used in JS saved in a RESX file, such as:

DATE_PICKER_FORMAT   yyyy-mm-dd  
DATETIME_FORMAT      yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss  
MONTH_PICKER_FORMAT  yyyy-mm  

I wrote a simple class to help write this into JS on a Razor view:

public static class JavascriptResourceRenderer
{
    private static string Render(ResourceSet resources)
    {
        string resourceString = "";

        foreach (DictionaryEntry resource in resources)
        {
            resourceString += String.Format("var {0} = '{1}'; ", resource.Key, resource.Value);
        }

        return resourceString;
    }

    public static string RenderPageConstants()
    {
        ResourceSet resources = PageConstants.ResourceManager.GetResourceSet(CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture, true, true);
        return Render(resources);
    }
}

And in my view, I'm doing this:

@section Scripts
{
    <script>
        @JavascriptResourceRenderer.RenderPageConstants()
    </script>
}

The constants do get rendered when the view loads, except the quotes come out encoded.

Viewing the HTML using DOM inspector, this is what I see:

<script>
    var MONTH_PICKER_FORMAT = &#39;yyyy-mm&#39;;  
</script>

I've tried

"var {0} = '{1}'; "   // writes 'yyyy-mm' to view
"var {0} = \"{1}\"; " // writes "yyyy-mm" to view
@"var {0} = "{1}"; "  // syntax error in String.Format 

How can I write

<script>
    var MONTH_PICKER_FORMAT = "yyyy-mm"; // or 'yyyy-mm' (I want the quotes!)
</script>

to the view?

Answer 1

You should return your output as an MvcHtmlString instead, otherwise MVC will encode it:

private static MvcHtmlString Render(ResourceSet resources)
{
    string resourceString = "";

    foreach (DictionaryEntry resource in resources)
    {
        resourceString += String.Format("var {0} = '{1}'; ", resource.Key, resource.Value);
    }

    return new MvcHtmlString(resourceString);
}

Alternatively, you can use the Html Helper method Html.Raw in your view, but you need to remember to do that every time you call the method (which is why I would not recommend to do it this way):

@Html.Raw(JavascriptResourceRenderer.RenderPageConstants())