e Best JSON Parser for Silverlight and C#/.NET

Up until a couple of months ago I was writing most of my code using WPF. Recently, a project came up where Silverlight made more sense to use. I’d thought that wouldn’t be a problem since I’d just use JavaScriptSerializer[wrote about it here] like I did for my WPF project.

Uh oh. It turns out that Silverlight doesn’t have JavaScriptSerializer. Never fear! DataContractJsonSerializer is here! Or so I thought.

It turns out that if you want to use DataContractJsonSerializer you must actually create POCOs to backup this “data contract.” I didn’t want to do that.

I wanted to turn this…

1

{

2	"some_number": 108.541,

3	"date_time": "2011-04-13T15:34:09Z",

4	"serial_number": "SN1234"

5	"more_data": {

6	"field1": 1.0

7	"field2": "hello"

8

}

9

}

into..

1	using System.Web.Script.Serialization;

2

3	var jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();

4	var dict = jss.Deserialize<dynamic>(jsonText);

5

6	Console.WriteLine(dict["some_number"]); //outputs 108.541

7	Console.WriteLine(dict["more_data"]["field2"]); //outputs hello

So I set out to write my own JSON parser. I call it FridayThe13th… how fitting huh? Now, using either Silverlight or .NET 4.0, you can parse the previous JSON into the following:

1	using FridayThe13th;

2

3	var jsonText = File.ReadAllText("mydata.json");

4

5	var jsp = new JsonParser(){CamelizeProperties = true};

6	dynamic json = jsp.Parse(jsonText);

7

8	Console.WriteLine(json.SomeNumber); //outputs 108.541

9	Console.WriteLine(json.MoreData.Field2); //outputs hello

Since I work with a lot of Ruby on Rails backends, I want to add a property “CamelizeProperties” to turn “some_number” into “SomeNumber”… it’s more .NET like.

Try it! You can find it on Github. Oh yeah… it’s also faster than that other .NET JSON library that everyone uses.

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-JP