XML Highlight in RichTextBox

 

Recently I’ve been looking for some piece of code that would perform XML highlighting in a Rich Text Box. The Internet provides several free samples and several commercial samples but I wasn’t really satisfied with what I found, mainly because it involved using an XMLTextReader object, which does not help for WYSWYG editing of the XML file.

So I created a simple C# function that formats the text content from a RichTextBox:

public static void HighlightRTF(RichTextBox rtb)

The complexity is roughly O( n ), where n is the number of characters in the XML file.

Here is the result:

You’ll find the function in the text attachment.

highlightRTF.txt

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 04, 2012
  Nice - Been trying this for the past few days now with no luck. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  February 24, 2012
  Nice work. Angle brackets should be in blue though.

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2012
  Perfect stuff

• Anonymous
  September 24, 2012
  Good stuff....finally found what I want.....thanks

• Anonymous
  October 27, 2012
  how can i convert this class to dll file i tried but i can't?

• Anonymous
  September 10, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2014
  It is not working for WPF C# properly. Can you please help me on this?

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2014
  I have changed for RichTextBox text like:TextRange allTextRange = new TextRange(rtb.Document.ContentStart, rtb.Document.ContentEnd);string str = allTextRange.Text;and took the range as like:allTextRange.Select(start.GetPositionAtOffset(lasten + 1), start.GetPositionAtOffset(st));                    allTextRange.ApplyPropertyValue(TextElement.ForegroundProperty,HighlightColors.HC_INNERTEXT);Although its not showing properly. I am applying text in RichBoxText by XMLDocument like belowXmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();doc.Load(parentRef."FilePath.xml);gameListXMLText.Document.Blocks.Clear();gameListXMLText.AppendText(doc.InnerXml.ToString());HighlightRTF(gameListXMLText);So please let me know, where i am doing wrong?

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2014
  Consider the Nevron Rich Text Editor control (www.nevron.com/products-open-vision-nov-rich-text-editor-control-overview.aspx) works in WPF, Siliverlight and WinForm apps...

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2015
  I made a subclass of RichTextBox and put your code in the TextChanged event handler.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2015
  The file is truncated! Thus useless...

• Anonymous
  August 06, 2015
  Thanks Costin Boldisor, that was a real help , and is working great.

• Anonymous
  November 08, 2015
  Hi! Anyone having the file? it seems that it has got truncated when i try to download it :(

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2016
  Great!, But the Complexity of O(n) takes too long.

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2016
  Amazing! Thanks!

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2017
  This is amazing, thank you so much!