Question

How could you convert a string of JSON to a C# NameValueCollection simply, preferably without using a 3rd party parser?

Answer 1

I’m not sure why everyone is still recommending JSON.NET for deserialization of JSON. I wrote a blog post on how to deserialize JSON to C#.

In short, it’s like this:

using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

var jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();
var dict = jss.Deserialize<Dictionary<string, string>>(jsonText);

NameValueCollection nvc = null;
if (dict != null) {
  nvc = new NameValueCollection(dict.Count);
  foreach (var k in dict) {
    nvc.Add(k.Key, k.Value);
  }
}
                    }
var json = jss.Serialize(dict);
Console.WriteLine(json);

Be sure to add a reference to System.Web.Extensions.dll.

Note:
I usually deserialize to dynamic, so I’m assuming that NameValueCollection would work. However, I haven’t verified if it actually does.