My name is Edward Tanguay. I'm an American software and web developer living and working in Berlin, Germany.
C# CODE EXAMPLE created on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 permalink
How to serialize from object to string and deserialize from string to object
This example has two reusable methods that make serialization and deserialization between object and string one line statements.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Text;

namespace TestSerialize2342
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            List<Customer> customers = Customer.GetCustomers();

            Console.WriteLine("--- Serializing ------------------");

            foreach (var customer in customers)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Serializing " + customer.GetFullName() + "...");
                string xml = XmlHelpers.SerializeObject<Customer>(customer);
                Console.WriteLine(xml);
                Console.WriteLine("Deserializing ...");
                Customer customer2 = XmlHelpers.DeserializeObject<Customer>(xml);
                Console.WriteLine(customer2.GetFullName());
                Console.WriteLine("---");
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }

    }

    public static class StringHelpers
    {
        public static String UTF8ByteArrayToString(Byte[] characters)
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            String constructedString = encoding.GetString(characters);
            return (constructedString);
        }

        public static Byte[] StringToUTF8ByteArray(String pXmlString)
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            Byte[] byteArray = encoding.GetBytes(pXmlString);
            return byteArray;
        }
    }

    public static class XmlHelpers
    {
        public static string SerializeObject<T>(object o)
        {
            MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            XmlTextWriter xtw = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.UTF8);
            xs.Serialize(xtw, o);
            ms = (MemoryStream)xtw.BaseStream;
            return StringHelpers.UTF8ByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray());
        }

        public static T DeserializeObject<T>(string xml)
        {
            XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(StringHelpers.StringToUTF8ByteArray(xml));
            XmlTextWriter xtw = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.UTF8);
            return (T)xs.Deserialize(ms);
        }
    }

    public class Customer
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public string Street { get; set; }
        public string Location { get; set; }
        public string ZipCode { get; set; }

        private int internalValue = 23;

        public static List<Customer> GetCustomers()
        {
            List<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>();
            customers.Add(new Customer { Id = 1, FirstName = "Jim", LastName = "Jones", ZipCode = "23434" });
            customers.Add(new Customer { Id = 2, FirstName = "Joe", LastName = "Adams", ZipCode = "12312" });
            customers.Add(new Customer { Id = 3, FirstName = "Jack", LastName = "Johnson", ZipCode = "23111" });
            customers.Add(new Customer { Id = 4, FirstName = "Angie", LastName = "Reckar", ZipCode = "54343" });
            customers.Add(new Customer { Id = 5, FirstName = "Henry", LastName = "Anderson", ZipCode = "16623" });
            return customers;
        }

        public string GetFullName()
        {
            return FirstName + " " + LastName + "(" + internalValue + ")";
        }

    }
}
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