How to Deserialize JSON data?

Question

I am new to working with JSON data.

I am reading data from a web service. The query data sent back is the following:

[["B02001_001E","NAME","state"],
 ["4712651","Alabama","01"],
 ["691189","Alaska","02"],
 ["6246816","Arizona","04"],
 ["18511620","Florida","12"],
 ["9468815","Georgia","13"],
 ["1333591","Hawaii","15"],
 ["1526797","Idaho","16"],
 ["3762322","Puerto Rico","72"]]

Is there a way to Deserialize this data in such a way that the base object will be generated without me first defining what the object is like? In the above example the object is defined by the first row:

           ["B02001_001E","NAME","state"],

In general the web service will return the query data formatted as a two dimensional JSON array where the first row provides column names and subsequent rows provide data values.

Solution 1

You can deserialize this really easily. The data's structure in C# is just List<string[]> so you could just do;

  List<string[]> data = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<string[]>>(jsonString);

The above code is assuming you're using json.NET.

EDIT: Note the json is technically an array of string arrays. I prefer to use List<string[]> for my own declaration because it's imo more intuitive. It won't cause any problems for json.NET, if you want it to be an array of string arrays then you need to change the type to (I think) string[][] but there are some funny little gotcha's with jagged and 2D arrays in C# that I don't really know about so I just don't bother dealing with it here.

Solution 2

If you use .Net 4.5 you can also use standard .Net json serializer:

using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;
...    
Stream jsonSource = ...; // serializer will read data stream
var s = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(string[][]));
var j = (string[][])s.ReadObject(jsonSource);

In .Net 4.5 and older you can use JavaScriptSerializer class:

using System.Web.Script.Serialization;
...
JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
string[][] list = serializer.Deserialize<string[][]>(json);