Non breaking space in XAML vs. code

Question

This works fine, and correctly inserts non-breaking spaces into the string:

<TextBlock Text="Non&#160;Breaking&#160;Text&#160;Here"></TextBlock>

But what I really need is to replace spaces with non-breaking spaces during data binding. So I wrote a simple value converter that replaces spaces with " ". It does indeed replace spaces with " " but " " is displayed literally instead of showing as a non-breaking space. This is my converter:

public class SpaceToNbspConverter : IValueConverter
{
    #region IValueConverter Members

    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        return value.ToString().Replace(" ", " ");
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }

    #endregion
}

Does anybody know why it works in XAML, but not in code?

Solution 1

Have you tried return value.ToString().Replace(' ', System.Convert.ToChar(160)); ?

Solution 2

In code the syntax for escaping Unicode chars is different than in XAML:

XAML:  
C#:   \x00A0

So this should have worked in code:

return value.ToString().Replace(" ", "\xA0");

Solution 3

The reason Char is working and string is not - is that the string is escaped when rendered.

Comments

[Henrik Söderlund]

Perfect! Thanks! Do you know why it is necessary to work with char rather than string?

[Erusso87]

It should work with the string override too. Just cast the ToChar() to string afterwards.

[Tore Aurstad]

Great. I needed this to tweak a <Run> inside a <TextBlock>. Thx.