An extended RichTextBox to save and load "HTML lite" files

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/edit/htmlrichtextbox.aspx

HtmlRichTextBox_src.zip

Introduction

When I was working on a chat application I found that the .NET RichTextBox control only allows you to save and load files using RTF codes or plain text files (oh! my God).

I also wanted a method for inserting images and ActiveX controls into the RichTextBox control, please see my article: Inserting images into a RichTextBox control (the OLE way).

Well, I decided to implement a successful solution to save and load "HTML lite" text into the RichTextBox control. It is named "HTML lite" because I don't handle all the HTML tags, only a small subset of them with some constraints. But, the control can be extended according to your needs to include other features and HTML tags handlers.

Background

I use Win32 APIs to get character and paragraph formatting structures. This should be more efficient than calling the native RichTextBox methods because I believe every call to a RichTextBox method makes a system SendMessage call, and I can use the PARAFORMAT and CHARFORMAT structures to get more information about the RichTextBox content with only one call at a time. There are many Internet sites and blogs that use this approach.