Question

I know that this question has been asked ad nauseam, but the existing answers haven’t been particularly helpful for me. The best is Deserialize JSON into C# dynamic object?, but I don’t want to create an object, I want to create a Dictionary.

I serialize my data like so, and I want to deserialize to precisely the same data structure:

    public static string AugDictToJSON(Dictionary<string, List<Dictionary<string, object>>> dict)
    {
        return string.Join(",", dict.Select(
            d => string.Format("{{ \"{0}\" : [ {1} ] }}", d.Key,
                string.Join(",", d.Value.Select(i => SubAugDictToJSON(i)).ToArray())
            )).ToArray());
    }

    public static string SubAugDictToJSON(Dictionary<string, object> dict)
    {
        return string.Join(",", dict.Select(
                d => string.Format("{{ \"{0}\" : \"{1}\" }}", d.Key, d.Value.ToString())
            ).ToArray());
    }

---

EDIT: Solution is the following (from accepted answer):

public static Dictionary<string, List<Dictionary<string, object>>> JSONToAugDict(string json)
{
    return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Dictionary<string, List<Dictionary<string, object>>>>(json);
}

Answer 1

I recommend using the NuGet package ‘Newtonsoft.Json‘.

This package is used by WebAPI for serialization / deserialization and is quite fast. More information can be found here: http://james.newtonking.com/pages/json-net.aspx

var results = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(json);

Alternatively, as an IDictionary:

var result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<IDictionary<string, object>>(json);