Application Development

How to process JSON using C# and Newtonsoft.Json?

by Siddharth Pandey · Published · Updated

In this post, I’ll tell you how to process JSON using C# and Newtonsoft.Json with proper code. Newtonsoft.Json is a popular high-performance JSON framework for .NET and is also know by Json.NET.

What is JSON?

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition – December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.
– http://www.json.org/

I’ve created a console application in Visual Studio 2015 so that it is easy to simply write my program and see the output in console quickly. In order to process JSON using C#, the next step is to install Newtonsoft.Json framework using Nuget package manager to this project.

Following are the ways to use Newtonsoft.Json framework to serialize and deserialize JSON easily:

JsonSerializer is the quickest method of converting between JSON text and a .NET object. It converts .NET objects into their JSON equivalent and back again by mapping the .NET object property names to the JSON property names and copies the values.
JsonConvert is useful for simple cases where you want to convert to and from a JSON string. This provides the SerializeObject() and DeserializeObject() methods on JsonConvert provide an easy-to-use wrapper over JsonSerializer.

I’ve also created a class named Author as shown below that will be used for the type of object for deserialization.

public class Author
{
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public List<string> Courses { get; set; }

    public DateTimeOffset Since { get; set; }

    public bool IsHappy { get; set; }

    public string Country { get; set; }

    public int Age { get; set; }

    public List<Author> FavouriteAuthors { get; set; }

}

public class Author

{

public string Name { get; set; }

public List<string> Courses { get; set; }

public DateTimeOffset Since { get; set; }

public bool IsHappy { get; set; }

public string Country { get; set; }

public int Age { get; set; }

public List<Author> FavouriteAuthors { get; set; }

}

To run the application and see the result in console, I’ve following in the Program.cs file:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.Clear();

        JsonConvertDemo.ShowDemo();

        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Console.Clear();

JsonConvertDemo.ShowDemo();

Console.ReadLine();

}

Next, I’ve created another class named JsonConvertDemo that has only one method named ShowDemo as shown below:

public class JsonConvertDemo
{

    private static string authorRawData = @"{
                                          'Name': 'Sid',
                                          'Courses': [
                                            'Course 1',
                                            'Course 2'
                                          ],
                                          'Since': '2017-03-01T22:09:39.9369001+00:00',
                                          'IsHappy': true,
                                          'Country': 'India',
                                          'Age': 25
                                        }";

    public static void ShowDemo()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Follow is the JSON raw data:");
        Console.WriteLine(authorRawData);

        var author = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Author>(authorRawData);
        Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + author.Name + " is an author from " + author.Country);

        string serializedAuthorData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(author);
        Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + serializedAuthorData);

        string formattedSerializedAuthorData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(author, Formatting.Indented);
        Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + formattedSerializedAuthorData);
    }
}

public class JsonConvertDemo

{

private static string authorRawData = @"{

'Name': 'Sid',

'Courses': [

'Course 1',

'Course 2'

'Since': '2017-03-01T22:09:39.9369001+00:00',

'IsHappy': true,

'Country': 'India',

'Age': 25

}";

public static void ShowDemo()

{

Console.WriteLine("Follow is the JSON raw data:");

Console.WriteLine(authorRawData);

var author = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Author>(authorRawData);

Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + author.Name + " is an author from " + author.Country);

string serializedAuthorData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(author);

Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + serializedAuthorData);

string formattedSerializedAuthorData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(author, Formatting.Indented);

Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + formattedSerializedAuthorData);

}

Line no. 19 writes the JSON author data that is defined in a private variable named authorRawData on line no. 4.
On line no. 21, we use the DeserializeObject method to convert the string to a .NET object. Notice the <Author> type that is passed to the method which is the type of the object to deserialize to. And line no. 22 writes the name and country of author.
Line no. 24 uses the SerializeObject method to convert the author object back to string format and in the next line it is added to the console. The output in the console is not formatted in the way you would expect.
Line no. 27 also serialize the object but uses one of the overload of SerlializeObject by passing Formatting.Indented as the formatting option for the underlying Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextWriter. And when this new object is written to the console, the output is now formatted properly.

I hope this is useful to understand how to process JSON using C# and Newtonsoft.Json. I’ll be writing more posts about this popular high-performance JSON framework soon. If you would like to get updates, please subscribe to my blog.

Tags: .Net ASP.NET C#JSON JSON.NET Newtonsoft.Json

Siddharth Pandey

Siddharth Pandey is a Software Engineer with thorough hands-on commercial experience & exposure to building enterprise applications using Agile methodologies. Siddharth specializes in building, managing on-premise, cloud based real-time standard, single page web applications (SPAs). He has successfully delivered applications in health-care, finance, insurance, e-commerce sectors for major brands in the UK. Other than programming, he also has experience of managing teams, trainer, actively contributing to the IT community by sharing his knowledge using Stack Overflow, personal website & video tutorials.