C# write object to file in human-readable text

Question

Do there exist any standard mechanisms or processes to output any C# object to file in human-readable text format ?

Unlike serialization ( BinaryFormatter.Serializer ) this would not ever require reading back the object from file.

Have you looked into JSON? There is a built in JSONDataContractFormatter and also several nuget libraries that can help you out with that — iMortalitySX, Jul 10 '17 at 20:38
xml / json / yaml serialization (ordered by human readability increase) — Sergey Berezovskiy, Jul 10 '17 at 20:39
Would [XmlSerializer](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/10y9yyta(v=vs.110).aspx) not work? — txtechhelp, Jul 10 '17 at 20:42
`.ToString()` seem to be perfect fit... Are you interested in reading it back too? — Alexei Levenkov, Jul 10 '17 at 20:51

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 10 '17 at 20:49

There are many different "human readable" formats you could use to represent data (XML, JSON, YAML, etc). A common one is JSON.

There is a library called JSON.NET that is very heavily used in the .NET community for handling JSON. You can use built in .NET methods but I prefer this nuget package. With JSON.NET you can do something as simple as:

MyClass someObject = new MyClass();
someObject.SomeProperty = "Foo";
someObject.SomeOtherProperty = "Bar";
string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(someObject);

That string "json" would look similar to this:

{
    "SomeProperty":"Foo",
    "SomeOtherProperty":"Bar"
}

I made a fiddle here that shows a sample class I created and how it looks when its serialized into JSON.

C# write object to file in human-readable text

1 Answers1