Loading and saving RTF content in Xamarin Rich Text Editor

20 Jan 20255 minutes to read

The Xamarin Rich Text Editor control provides support to load and save RTF content with help of Essential® DocIO.

Prerequisite

To manipulate RTF content in your application, the Syncfusion.Xamarin.DocIO.nupkg must be referred. The installation procedure of this NuGet package is available here.

Loading the RTF content into the Rich Text Editor.

The RTF content must be converted to HTML using the Essential® DocIO and then, converted HTML need to be loaded into the Rich Text Editor. The following code example shows how to load the RTF content into a Rich Text Editor control.

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();
	// Loading the RTF content as Word document using the  DocIO
    WordDocument doc = new WordDocument(rtfStream, Syncfusion.DocIO.FormatType.Rtf);
    writer.Close();
    HTMLExport export = new HTMLExport();
    MemoryStream htmlStream = new MemoryStream();      
	// Saving the Word document as RTF
    export.SaveAsXhtml(doc, htmlStream, Encoding.UTF8);
    doc.Close();
    htmlStream.Position = 0;
	// Loading equivalent HTML obtained from DocIO
    RichTextEditor.HtmlText = IgnoreVoidElementsInHTML(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(htmlStream.ToArray()));
	htmlStream.Dispose();
}

/// <summary>
/// Correcting void elements in the HTML. 
/// </summary>
/// <param name="inputString">HTML string with void HTML elements</param>
/// <returns></returns>
private string IgnoreVoidElementsInHTML(string inputString)
{
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8\">", "")
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<br>", "<br/>");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("\n", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("\r", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<title></title>", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC" +
        " \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd\">", "");
    return inputString;
}

Save Rich Text Editor content as RTF

The SfRichTextEditor does not directly retrieves the content as RTF. Instead, the HTML content must be converted as RTF using the Essential® DocIO. The following code example shows how to retrieve the RTF content from the Rich Text Editor.

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();
	string htmlstring = IgnoreVoidElementsInHTML(RTE.HtmlText);
    var htmlStream = new MemoryStream();
    var writer = new StreamWriter(htmlStream, Encoding.UTF8);
    writer.Write(htmlstring);
    writer.Flush();
    htmlStream.Position = 0;
	// Creates a Word document using the RTE HTML
    WordDocument document = new WordDocument(htmlStream, Syncfusion.DocIO.FormatType.Html, XHTMLValidationType.None);
    MemoryStream rtfStream = new MemoryStream();
    document.SaveOptions.OptimizeRtfFileSize = true;
	// Save the Word document as RTF
    document.Save(rtfStream, Syncfusion.DocIO.FormatType.Rtf);
    rtfStream.Position = 0;
	// Retrieving RTF stream as string
    string rtfString = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(rtfStream.ToArray());
    rtfStream.Dispose();
    document.Close();
}

/// <summary>
/// Correcting void elements in the HTML. 
/// </summary>
/// <param name="inputString">HTML string with void HTML elements</param>
/// <returns>This method make your HTML to pass the DocIO HTML validation</returns>
private string IgnoreVoidElementsInHTML(string inputString)
{
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8\">", "")
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<br>", "<br/>");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("\n", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("\r", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<title></title>", "");
    inputString = inputString.Replace("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC" +
        " \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd\">", "");
    return inputString;
}

NOTE

When loading the HTML content in a Word document, DocIO will perform XHTML 1.0 validation and HTML will be loaded only if the validation is passed. Kindly refer to this documentation to know about HTML Validation.

The sample explaining loading and saving RTF content in the RichTextEditor can be downloaded here.