8BitRick / json

A really simple C# JSON Parser in 350 lines

Tiny Json

A really simple C# JSON parser in ~350 lines

• Attempts to parse JSON files with minimal GC allocation
• Nice and simple "[1,2,3]".FromJson<List<int>>() API
• Classes and structs can be parsed too!

class Foo 
{ 
  public int Value;
}
"{\"Value\":10}".FromJson<Foo>()

• Anonymous JSON is parsed into Dictionary<string,object> and List<object>

var test = "{\"Value\":10}".FromJson<object>();
int number = ((Dictionary<string,object>)test)["Value"];

• No JIT Emit support to support AOT compilation on iOS
• Attempts are made to NOT throw an exception if the JSON is corrupted or invalid: returns null instead.
• Only public fields and property setters on classes/structs will be written to
• You can optionally use [IgnoreDataMember] and [DataMember(Name="Foo")] to ignore vars and override the default name

Limitations:

• No JIT Emit support to parse structures quickly
• Limited to parsing <2GB JSON files (due to int.MaxValue)
• Parsing of abstract classes or interfaces is NOT supported and will throw an exception.

Example Usage

This example will write a list of ints to a File and read it back again:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;

using TinyJson;

public static class JsonTest
{
  public static void Main(string[] args)
  {
    //Write a file
    List<int> values = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 };
    string json = values.ToJson();
    File.WriteAllText("test.json", json);
    
    //Read it back
    string fileJson = File.ReadAllText("test.json");
    List<int> fileValues = fileJson.FromJson<List<int>>();
  }
}

Save this as JsonTest.cs then compile and run with mcs JsonTest.cs && mono JsonTest.exe

Installation

Simply copy and paste the JSON Parser and/or the JSON Writer into your project. I also provide NuGet but I recommend the copy paste route ;)