Inline HtmlEncode for Gridview and Repeater ASP.Net Controls

Today I had an issue where some non-standard characters needed to be displayed in a table which was created by an ASP:Repeater control.  The problem was some of these symbols were angle brackets so they were messing up the HTML of the table.

I wanted a clean and simple way to HtmlEncode these so they would render correctly.  I first tried to make the Server.HtmlEncode method work inline but I didn't have much luck.  Quite a few search results on Google said it was not possible and most people suggested encoding the text inside a DataBound event.

I eventually found the answer to doing it inline, which I think is much cleaner.  My original markup was:

<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "FirstName") %>

To get this encoded I use:

<%#Server.HtmlEncode((string)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "FirstName"))%>

I tried many variations on this but it was the cast to string that I was missing  It's not immediately obvious that cast is required as the documentation for Eval suggests a string is returned.