Question

While trying to answer another question, I was serializing a C# object to an XML string. It was surprisingly hard; this was the shortest code snippet I could come up with:

var yourList = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };
var ms = new MemoryStream();
var xtw = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.UTF8);
var xs = new XmlSerializer(yourList.GetType());
xs.Serialize(xtw, yourList);
var encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
string xmlEncodedList = encoding.GetString(ms.GetBuffer());

The result is okay:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ArrayOfInt
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <int>1</int>
    <int>2</int>
    <int>3</int>
</ArrayOfInt>

But the snippet is more complicated than I think it should be. I can’t believe you have to know about encoding and MemoryStream for this simple task.

Is there a shorter way to serialize an object to an XML string?

Answer 1

A little shorter 🙂

var yourList = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };
using (var writer = new StringWriter())
{
    new XmlSerializer(yourList.GetType()).Serialize(writer, yourList);
    var xmlEncodedList = writer.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
}

Although there’s a flaw with this previous approach that’s worth pointing out. It will generate an utf-16 header as we use StringWriter so it is not exactly equivalent to your code. To get utf-8 header we should use a MemoryStream and an XmlWriter which is an additional line of code:

var yourList = new List<int>() { 1, 2, 3 };
using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
{
    using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(stream))
    {
        new XmlSerializer(yourList.GetType()).Serialize(writer, yourList);
        var xmlEncodedList = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());
    }
}