Handling Special Characters in XML with .NET's XDocument - Unexpected Encoding Issues
I'm trying to implement I've hit a wall trying to I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help... I'm deploying to production and I'm currently working with XML serialization in a .NET 5.0 application and working with issues with special characters such as `&`, `<`, and `>` in the XML content. When I try to serialize an object containing these characters, I get unexpected results. For example, the XML output seems to encode these characters incorrectly, and sometimes it even throws an `XmlException` stating, "Invalid character in the given encoding." I've tried using `XDocument` instead of `XmlDocument` for better handling of LINQ queries, but the question continues. Hereβs a simplified version of my code: ```csharp using System; using System.Xml.Linq; public class MyData { public string Name { get; set; } public string Description { get; set; } } public class Program { public static void Main() { var data = new MyData { Name = "Sample & Test", Description = "This is a <test> description." }; var xml = new XElement("Data", new XElement("Name", data.Name), new XElement("Description", data.Description) ); Console.WriteLine(xml); } } ``` When I run this code, I expect the output to be: ```xml <Data> <Name>Sample & Test</Name> <Description>This is a <test> description.</Description> </Data> ``` However, the output appears as: ```xml <Data> <Name>Sample & Test</Name> <Description>This is a <test> description.</Description> </Data> ``` The `&` and angle brackets `<` and `>` are not being encoded properly. I've checked the documentation and ensured that I'm using the correct XML escaping techniques, but I'm still not seeing the desired output. I also tried explicitly setting an `XmlWriterSettings` object to include `NewLineHandling` and `Indent`, but it didn't resolve the encoding scenario. What could be going wrong here? Are there specific settings or methods I need to leverage in `XDocument` to ensure proper encoding of special characters? My development environment is Windows. Cheers for any assistance! I recently upgraded to Csharp 3.10. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm working with Csharp in a Docker container on Windows 11. For reference, this is a production service. Am I missing something obvious? Thanks, I really appreciate it!