Serialize/Deserialze to a string C#

Question

First time playing with serialization in C#... any help would be greatly appreciated! The following are my generic serializer and deserializer:

    public static string SerializeObject<T>(T objectToSerialize)
    {
        BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
        MemoryStream memStr = new MemoryStream();

        try
        {
            bf.Serialize(memStr, objectToSerialize);
            memStr.Position = 0;

            return Convert.ToBase64String(memStr.ToArray());
        }
        finally
        {
            memStr.Close();
        }
    }

    public static T DeserializeObject<T>(string str)
    {
        BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
        byte[] b = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str);
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(b);

        try
        {
            return (T)bf.Deserialize(ms);
        }
        finally
        {
            ms.Close();
        }
    }

This is the object I am trying to serialize:

[Serializable()]
class MatrixSerializable : ISerializable
{
    private bool markerFound;
    private Matrix matrix;

    public MatrixSerializable( Matrix m, bool b)
    {
        matrix = m;
        markerFound = b;
    }

    public MatrixSerializable(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext ctxt)
    {
        markerFound = (bool)info.GetValue("markerFound", typeof(bool));

        matrix = Matrix.Identity;

        if (markerFound)
        {

            //deserialization code
        }
    }

    public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext ctxt)
    {
        // serialization code
    }

    public Matrix Matrix
    {
        get { return matrix; }
        set { matrix = value; }
    }

    public bool MarkerFound
    {
        get { return markerFound; }
        set { markerFound = value; }
    }
}

And an example of how am running it:

        MatrixSerializable ms = new MatrixSerializable(Matrix.Identity * 5, true);

        string s = Serializer.SerializeObject<MatrixSerializable>(ms);

        Console.WriteLine("serialized: " + s);

        ms = Serializer.DeserializeObject<MatrixSerializable>(s);

        Console.WriteLine("deserialized: " + ms.Matrix + " " + ms.MarkerFound);

When I try to run this I get an error "SerializationException was unhandled: The input stream is not a valid binary format. The starting contents (in bytes) are: 41-41-45-41-41-41-44-2F-2F-2F-2F-2F-41-51-41-41-41 ..."

Any advice on what I am doing wrong or how to fix this would be greatly appreciated!

Solution

You are using Base64 to convert byte array to string and GetUtf8 bytes to convert from string back to byte array.

Replace System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str); with Convert.FromBase64String(str);