Question

I am trying to write to a file an array of object serialised into JSON format. I am trying to write it in two different way as shown below.

ToSerialise[] Obj = new ToSerialise[10];
        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
        {
            Obj[i] = new ToSerialise();
        }

        //First form of serialising
        UnicodeEncoding uniEncoding = new UnicodeEncoding();
        String SerialisedOutput;
        SerialisedOutput = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(Obj, Formatting.Indented);
        FileStream fs1 = new FileStream(@"C:\file1.log", FileMode.CreateNew);
        fs1.Write(uniEncoding.GetBytes(SerialisedOutput), 0, uniEncoding.GetByteCount(SerialisedOutput));
        fs1.Close();

        //Second form of serialising
        FileStream fs2 = new FileStream(@"C:\file2.log", FileMode.CreateNew);
        StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fs2);
        JsonWriter jw = new JsonTextWriter(sw);
        JsonSerializer js = new JsonSerializer();
        jw.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
        js.Serialize(jw, Obj);
        jw.Close();
        fs2.Close();

Even though the content of both the files are same, they have different file size. Actually the first file is exactly twice the size of the second file. I tried comparing the output using textpad and it says they are excatly the same. Why do they have different file size?

I am running this on Windows 7 32 bit, .Net4

Thanks

Answer 1

Even though the content of both the files are same, they have different file size.

If they have a different size, then they definitely have different contents. A file is (pretty much) just a sequence of bytes – and if two sequences have different lengths, they’re different sequences.

In this case, the two files both represent the same text, but using different encodings – file2 will use UTF-8, and file1 will use UTF-16.

To think of it a different way: if you saved the same picture to two files, one as JPEG and one as PNG, would you expect the files to be the same size?