Binary serialization and deserialization without creating files (via strings)

Question

I\'m trying to create a class that will contain functions for serializing/deserializing objects to/from string. That\'s what it looks like now:

public class          


        

Answer 1

Use UTF8 Base64 encoding instead of ASCII, for both encoding and decoding.

Answer 2

The result of serializing an object with BinaryFormatter is an octet stream, not a string.
You can't just treat the bytes as characters like in C or Python.

Encode the serialized object with Base64 to get a string instead:

public static string SerializeObject(object o)
{
    if (!o.GetType().IsSerializable)
    {
        return null;
    }

    using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        new BinaryFormatter().Serialize(stream, o);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(stream.ToArray());
    }
}

and

public static object DeserializeObject(string str)
{
    byte[] bytes = Convert.FromBase64String(str);

    using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(bytes))
    {
        return new BinaryFormatter().Deserialize(stream);
    }
}