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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T11:36:35+00:00

I am looking for the fastest way to serialize and deserialize a C# array

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I am looking for the fastest way to serialize and deserialize a C# array of objects into a string…

Why a string and not a byte array? Well, I am working with a networking system (The Unity3d networking system to be specific) and they have placed a rather annoying restriction which does not allow the sending of byte arrays or custom types, two things I need (hard to explain my situation).

The simplest solution I have come up with for this is to serialize my custom types into a string, and then transmit that string as opposed to directly sending the object array.

So, that is the question! What is the fastest way to serialize an object array into a string? I would preferably like to avoid using voodoo characters (invisible/special characters), as I am not sure if Unity3d will cull them, but base64 encoding doesn’t take full advantage of the allowed character spectrum. I am also worried about the efficiency of using base 64.

Obviously, since this is networking related, having the serialized data be as small as possible is a plus.

EDIT:
One possible way to do this would be to serialize to a byte array, and then pretend that that byte array is a string. The problem is, I am afraid that .Net 2.0, or Unity’s networking system will end up culling some of the special or invisible characters created using this method… Something which very much needs to be avoided. I am hoping for a solution that has near or equal speed to this, but does not use any of the characters that are likely to be culled. (I have no idea what characters these are, but I have had bad experiences with Unity when it came to direct conversions to strings from byte arrays)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Json.Net is what I always use its simple and gets the job done in a human readable way. Json is about as lightweight as it gets and is widely used for sending data over the wire.

    I’ll give you this answer as accepted, but I suggest adding base64 encoding to your answer!

    –Georges Oates Larsen

    Thank you, and yes that is also a great option if readability is not an issue.

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