JavaScriptSerializer example

Today at work I had a chance to try the JavaScriptSerializer class in the System.Web.Script.Serialization namespace. My task was simple enough – deserialize a JSON string to an object then serialize the object back to a JSON string. Before I used the two methods Deserialize() and Serialize(), I had to create two classes for my experiment:

[Serializable]

public class LatLong

{

public double? latitude;

public double? longitude;

}

[Serializable]

public class MapView

{

public LatLong center;

public int? zoom;

}

So here is the code to deserialize and Serialize:

using System.Text;

using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

string example = “{\”center\”:{\”latitude\”:\”49.266214\”,\”longitude\”:\”-122.998577\”},\”zoom\”:\”12\”}”;

JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();

// Deserialize

MapView view = serializer.Deserialize<MapView>(example);

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.Append(“center = (” + view.center.latitude.ToString() + “, “ + view.center.longitude.ToString() + “)” + “<br/>”);

sb.Append(“zoom = “ + view.zoom.ToString());

litDeserialization.Text = sb.ToString();

// Serialize

string jsonString = serializer.Serialize(view);

litSerialization.Text = jsonString;

}

The result is like:

Deserialization:

center = (49.266214, -122.998577)
zoom = 12

Serialization:

{”center”:{”latitude”:49.266214,”longitude”:-122.998577},”zoom”:12}