Label vs Literal in ASP.NET

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Unlike the Label control, the Literal control does not render any additional html tags thats why the best practice says: never use the ASP.NET Label control when a Literal can do the job. In different cases we use the Literal/Label controls to label input controls without knowing the difference between them. The below should help you to decide which control you should use when building asp.net web application.

Label vs Literal:

Label:

The Label web server control is used to label other controls on an aspx web page/UserControl. It is used to display text with the ability to change the style (appearing) of the displayed text.

Inheritance Hierarchy:
System.Object
System.Web.UI.Control
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebControl
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label

<asp:Label ID="lblFirstName" runat="server" CssClass="myCssClass" Text="First Name" />

It will be rendered as:

<span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblFirstName" class="myCssClass">First Name</span>
(NB: the id of the Label is related to the structure of your asp page and if you are using MasterPage or not)

Literal:

Use the System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal control to reserve a location on the Web page to display text. The Literal control is similar to the Label control, except the Literal control does not allow you to apply a style to the displayed text. You can programmatically control the text displayed in the control by setting the Text property.

Inheritance Hierarchy:
System.Object
System.Web.UI.Control
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Literal

<asp:Literal id="litFirstName" runat="server" Text="First Name"/>

It will be rendered as:

First Name

11 Comments

good article, then I suppose that i can put some of HTML code tha will be rendered, such as in hard-code,
string item = "First</br>name";
litFirstName.Text = item;
It will be rendered as:
First
name
regards!

Eric Ch&#225;irez - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 3:34:16 PM

Always use mode="Encode" in a literal control to ensure proper html-encoding or explicitly specify mode="Passthrough".

Richard - Friday, March 25, 2011 3:47:00 PM

Thanks for posting this topic.

comparwa - Friday, April 22, 2011 12:48:13 PM

Do literal controls have associated ViewState?  We've been using labels for years to remember viewstate (and yes, I know we could be using the ViewState bag instead), and I've only just realised that perhaps we should be using literals?

Thanks for blog, by the way - clearly explained.

notandrewturvil - Friday, August 12, 2011 8:16:01 AM

The real difference is Label HTML encodes.

Lavinski - Friday, October 14, 2011 5:40:20 AM

Label:-It is used to display text the user is not supposed to edit.we can set text in a Label by Text property.we can set different  styles of Label.

Literal:-with this we can assign the text ,we want to insert into the webform's HTML.or in other words it inserts the html needed to display the required text.

vipul - Sunday, January 8, 2012 2:55:35 PM

Very informative post. It's really helpful for me and helped me lot to complete my task. Thanks for sharing with us.

Thanks

Pravesh Singh - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:47:04 AM

Thanks for giving this types of information...

Nirav - Thursday, August 22, 2013 9:12:54 AM

thanks

Nirav - Thursday, August 22, 2013 9:13:47 AM

I like it.

umme - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 1:23:49 PM

good one

ashok - Friday, November 15, 2013 7:35:09 AM