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 BinarySerialization     {         public static string SerializeObject(object o)         {             string result = "";              if ((o.GetType().Attributes & TypeAttributes.Serializable) == TypeAttributes.Serializable)             {                 BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();                 using (MemoryStream str = new MemoryStream())                 {                     f.Serialize(str, o);                     str.Position = 0;                      StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(str);                     result = reader.ReadToEnd();                 }             }              return result;         }          public static object DeserializeObject(string str)         {             object result = null;              byte[] bytes = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(str);             using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(bytes))             {                 BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();                 result = bf.Deserialize(stream);             }              return result;         }     } 

SerializeObject method works well, but DeserializeObject does not. I always get an exception with message "End of Stream encountered before parsing was completed". What may be wrong here?

Answer 1

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);     } }