Text literal problem in MVC3 Razor view

Question

Why am I required to use the <text> tag to enclose the pipe literal '|' in this markup? Surely it is well outside the scope of the ActionLink method.

@foreach (var item in Model.DetailItem.PlannedResources)
{ 
    <tr>
        <td>
            @if (Model.ViewMode == ViewMode.Edit)
            {
                @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { id = item.PlannedResourceId }) <text>|</text>
                @Html.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new {id = item.PlannedResourceId})                                                                     
            }
            @Html.ActionLink("Details", "Details", new { id = item.PlannedResourceId })
        </td>
        <td>
            | @item.ResourceType.Name
        </td>
    </tr>
}

If I don't use it, I get the error CS1525: Invalid expression term '|', but the second '|' gets by unhindered.

Answer 1

It's because when you are inside a statement with { and } only HTML tags are considered as literals, everything else is server side script. So you need to either use standard HTML tags such as <div>, <span>, ... or if you want to use a literal use the special <text> tag which is not outputted to the response.