Serializing a list to JSON

Question

I have an object model that looks like this:

public MyObjectInJson
{
   public long ObjectID {get;set;}
   public string ObjectInJson {get;set;}
}

The property ObjectInJson is an already serialized version an object that contains nested lists. For the moment, I'm serializing the list of MyObjectInJson manually like this:

StringBuilder TheListBuilder = new StringBuilder();

TheListBuilder.Append("[");
int TheCounter = 0;

foreach (MyObjectInJson TheObject in TheList)
{
  TheCounter++;
  TheListBuilder.Append(TheObject.ObjectInJson);

  if (TheCounter != TheList.Count())
  {
    TheListBuilder.Append(",");
  }
}
TheListBuilder.Append("]");

return TheListBuilder.ToString();

I wonder if I can replace this sort of dangerous code with JavascriptSerializer and get the same results. How would I do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If using .Net Core 3.0 or later;

Default to using the built in System.Text.Json parser implementation.

e.g.

using System.Text.Json;

var json = JsonSerializer.Serialize(aList);

alternatively, other, less mainstream options are available like Utf8Json parser and Jil: These may offer superior performance, if you really need it but, you will need to install their respective packages.

If stuck using .Net Core 2.2 or earlier;

Default to using Newtonsoft JSON.Net as your first choice JSON Parser.

e.g.

using Newtonsoft.Json;

var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(aList);

you may need to install the package first.

PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json

For more details see and upvote the answer that is the source of this information.

For reference only, this was the original answer, many years ago;

// you need to reference System.Web.Extensions

using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

var jsonSerialiser = new JavaScriptSerializer();
var json = jsonSerialiser.Serialize(aList);