Converting RTF to HTML

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Posted on September 28, 2009 by Matthew

Have you ever had the desire to convert some RTF text into HTML? Probably not. But if you do, then you are in luck! I recently had the need to do this conversion and after some searching found out a way to do it by enhancing a sample distributed in the MSDN library.  The sample is called:XAML to HTML Conversion Demo. 

The sample has code which converts HTML to and from a XAML Flow Document.  But this doesn’t make things easier until you realize that there is a way to convert RTF to XAML easily. The key is to use System.Windows.Controls.RichTextBox which can load RTF from a stream and save it as XAML.  This conversion is shown below:

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private static string ConvertRtfToXaml(string rtfText) {     var richTextBox = new RichTextBox();     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(rtfText)) return "";     var textRange = new TextRange(richTextBox.Document.ContentStart, richTextBox.Document.ContentEnd);     using (var rtfMemoryStream = new MemoryStream())     {         using (var rtfStreamWriter = new StreamWriter(rtfMemoryStream))         {             rtfStreamWriter.Write(rtfText);             rtfStreamWriter.Flush();             rtfMemoryStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);             textRange.Load(rtfMemoryStream, DataFormats.Rtf);         }     }     using (var rtfMemoryStream = new MemoryStream())     {         textRange = new TextRange(richTextBox.Document.ContentStart, richTextBox.Document.ContentEnd);         textRange.Save(rtfMemoryStream, DataFormats.Xaml);         rtfMemoryStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);         using (var rtfStreamReader = new StreamReader(rtfMemoryStream))         {             return rtfStreamReader.ReadToEnd();         }     } }