What is serialization in c

Serialization in C is the process of bringing an object into a form that it can be written on stream. It's the process of converting the object into a form so that it can be stored on a file, database, or memory; or, it can be transferred across the network. Its main purpose is to save the state of the object so that it can be recreated when needed.

What is Deserialization in C? As the name suggests, deserialization in C is the reverse process of serialization. It is the process of getting back the serialized object so that it can be loaded into memory.

It resurrects the state of the object by setting properties, fields etc. Create a new Windows Form Application and add few controls to it as shown below. Now make a class named Employee: using System; using System. Generic; using System. Linq; using System. Text; using System. For those attributes which you don't want to serialize put [NonSerialized] on them.

Add a click event for Serialize button. When clicking on the serialize button we want to serialize the object of class Employee and store it in a file named "employee. If you didn't already have a fixed protocol XDR is a quite widely used choice. It's hard to know what to say if you can't change the representation though.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. It's also a good idea to prepend the file with some magic bytes and a version number, to quickly discriminate incoming data you definitely cannot process. Also giving each structure a version is possible.

And last but not least: Be paranoid when parsing data "from the outside", being not carefull makes your program attackable, or unstable at least. Of course, it needs to be said that this approach is entirely platform-specific and thus can't be used across machines or in networking scenarios. Also simply the representation format used, especially for negative numbers 2's or 1's complement? Show 4 more comments. Assaf Lavie Assaf Lavie I suggest using a library.

Bernardo Ramos Bernardo Ramos 2, 25 25 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges. I tried the binn library and it's pretty good. But I noticed there is a lot of serializing libraries which work in some cases but work very badly in some other. So depending on the content I would recommend trying few. Charlie Martin Charlie Martin k 23 23 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. In the end, I want to send the data, not the pointer of course : — ryyst.

RPC generation - making it possible to automatically generate the client and server side of the serialization. Serialization in C Often times, we need to store objects to a physical storage so it can be read back and converted back to an object. The process of storing an object to a physical storage is called serialization. The process of reading a serialized object back into memory is deserialization. In simple words serialization in C is a process of storing the object instance to a persistant storage.

Serialization stores state of objects i. Deserialization is reverse of serialization. It is a process of reading objects from a file where they have been stored.

In this code sample we will see how to serialize and deserialize objects using C. Here is how serialization works. Image source: Microsoft Docs. Namespaces involved Following namespaces are involved in serialization process, System. Serialization System.