Razor Syntax in Web Pages

Razor is the templating syntax ASP.NET Web Pages uses to blend server-side code with HTML. Its defining trick is the @ symbol, which the parser uses to detect the transition from markup into code without requiring closing tags like the old <% %> syntax from classic ASP. Writing @DateTime.Now inside a paragraph outputs the current server time directly into the rendered HTML, and the Razor parser is smart enough to figure out where the C# expression ends and plain text resumes based on characters like whitespace and angle brackets.

Razor distinguishes between a single inline expression, such as @userName, which just outputs a value, and a multi-statement code block wrapped in @{ }, which runs logic but does not automatically render anything unless you explicitly write out HTML inside it. Control structures like @if, @foreach, and @for do not need braces around the C# condition and can contain HTML directly inside their body, and Razor correctly infers where the HTML markup begins again after the condition, which is what makes it noticeably terser than the code-behind model in Web Forms.

Razor's @foreach loop is commonly used to render a table row or list item per item in a collection, and because Razor mixes code and markup so tightly, the loop body can contain plain HTML tags directly without needing string concatenation. For example, iterating over a List<string> of product names and emitting an <li> for each one requires no special output method; you simply place the HTML tag inside the loop's curly braces and Razor renders it once per iteration, substituting @item.Name for the current element on each pass.

Because @ is a reserved trigger character in Razor, you occasionally need to display a literal @ in your output, such as in an email address like support@example.com. Razor handles this with the @@ escape sequence, rendering a single @ character rather than starting a code expression. This matters in real-world Web Pages sites where footers or contact sections routinely include email addresses, and forgetting to escape the symbol produces a compile error because Razor tries to interpret the text after @ as C# code.