Question

Does anyone know how to convert a string which contains json into a C# array. I have this which reads the text/json from a webBrowser and stores it into a string.

string docText = webBrowser1.Document.Body.InnerText;

Just need to somehow change that json string into an array. Been looking at Json.NET but I’m not sure if that’s what I need, as I don’t want to change an array into json; but the other way around. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

just take the string and use the JavaScriptSerializer to deserialize it into a native object. For example, having this json:

string json = "[{Name:'John Simith',Age:35},{Name:'Pablo Perez',Age:34}]"; 

You’d need to create a C# class called, for example, Person defined as so:

public class Person
{
 public int Age {get;set;}
 public string Name {get;set;}
}

You can now deserialize the JSON string into an array of Person by doing:

JavaScriptSerializer js = new JavaScriptSerializer();
Person [] persons =  js.Deserialize<Person[]>(json);

Here’s a link to JavaScriptSerializer documentation.

Note: my code above was not tested but that’s the idea Tested it. Unless you are doing something “exotic”, you should be fine using the JavascriptSerializer.