Some time ago I developed a couple of functions to serialize an object and store it in a byte array and viceversa. Today I needed to store the resulting byte array to a System.String (I wanted to save it to an encrypted cookie which takes string as input parameter).
I tried to encode the byte array using the ASCII and UTF8 encoders but some byte values were not decoded properly, i.e. the value 255 after the encoding/decoding process will be decoded as 127. These were the error I would get:
- Invalid BinaryFormatter stream.
- Binary stream does not contain a valid BinaryHeader, 0 possible causes, invalid stream or object version change between serialization and deserialization.
After trying some other ideas I found that encoding/decoding to Base64 will get me the desired result.
Find the functions below.
/// Serializes a given object to binary
public static string SerializeToString(object o)
{
return Convert.ToBase64String(SerializeToBinary(o));
}
/// Deserializes a given object from binary
public static object DeserializeFromString(string s)
{
return DeserializeFromBinary(Convert.FromBase64String(s));
}
/// Serializes a given object to binary
public static byte[] SerializeToBinary(object o)
{
BinaryFormatter serializer = new BinaryFormatter();
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
serializer.Serialize(memoryStream, o);
Byte[] buffer = memoryStream.ToArray();
memoryStream.Close();
return buffer;
}
/// Deserializes a given object from binary
public static object DeserializeFromBinary(byte[] b)
{
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(b);
memoryStream.Position = 0;
BinaryFormatter serializer = new BinaryFormatter();
object o = serializer.Deserialize(memoryStream);
memoryStream.Close();
return o;
}