Generating HTML page in C# application

Question

I'm writing a C# application that needs to generate an HTML page. Only parts of the HTML (such as the title) need to be defined by the C# app. Basic markup etc is static.

Giving the example of title, currently I'm doing it this way. I have the basic html saved as a txt file. here's a portion:

 <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" /> <title>Title goes here</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" /> </head>

I read this into a string (wireframe) in my C# app, and then to change the title, I do a

oldtitle = "<title>Title goes here</title>"; newtitle = "<title>This is the title I want</title>"; wireframe = wireframe.Replace(oldtite,newtitle);

The above is just an example. the string wireframe actually consists of the entire html code. I'm wondering if the way I'm doing it is efficient? I'm guessing not since to change the title, I'm searching through the entire string.

What would be a more efficient way to achieve this?

Gregory Nozik · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-06 04:41:59Z

4

I had a similar task. I had a constant html structure and I needed to paste data. I defined XSLT and when receivng a data I did XSLT transformation. It worked fast.

answered Oct 6, 2011 at 4:41

Gregory Nozik

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1 Comment

Ayush Over a year ago

Hmm, interesting. A cursory glance at XSLT seems like it is what I need. I'll look into it further and try to implement it. Thanks!

ControlPower · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-06 04:34:47Z

You could use IndexOf Method to look up only once, for example:

int index = wireframe.IndexOf(oldtitle); wireframe = wireframe.Substring(0, index) + newtitle + wireframe.Substring(index + oldtitle.length);

mikey · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-06 04:38:26Z

I believe you can accomplish what you're trying to do with String.Format

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string.format.aspx

Template file could look like:

<head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" /> <title>{0}</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" /> </head>

Then

string input = ... // <-- read the "template" file into this string string output = String.Format(input, newTitle);

I believe this would be more efficient.

The problem I see with this is that it isn't very flexible. A slight change in the middle of the markup would mean changing all the indexes that follow.

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