.NET Core 3 Fast Built-in JSON Support

.NET users have largely relied on Newtonsoft.Json and other popular JSON libraries, which continue to be good choices. Newtonsoft.Json uses .NET strings as its base datatype, which is UTF-16 under the hood.

System.Text.Json

The System.Text.Json is built-in as part of the shared framework for .NET Core 3.0 and later versions.

• It provides functionality for serializing to and deserializing from JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
• The library design emphasizes high performance and low memory allocation over an extensive feature set.
• The built-in UTF-8 support optimizes the process of reading and writing JSON text encoded as UTF-8, which is the most prevalent encoding for data on the web and files on disk.
• The library also provides classes for working with an in-memory document object model (DOM). This feature enables random read-only access to the elements in a JSON file or string.

For earlier framework versions, install the System.Text.Json NuGet package.

To serialize to UTF-8, call the JsonSerializer.SerializeToUtf8Bytes method as shown below.

public class Customer
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
};

public static void Example1()
{
    Customer customer = new Customer()
    {
        Name = "Mark",
        Age = 40,
        Address = "22 Ashdown"
    };

    byte[] jsonUtf8Bytes = JsonSerializer.SerializeToUtf8Bytes(customer);

    Console.WriteLine(jsonUtf8Bytes);
}

To pretty-print the JSON output, set JsonSerializerOptions.WriteIndented to true as shown below.

public class Customer
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
};

public static void Example2()
{
    Customer customer = new Customer()
    {
        Name = "Mark",
        Age = 40,
        Address = "22 Ashdown"
    };

    var options = new JsonSerializerOptions
    {
        WriteIndented = true
    };
    var jsonUtf8Bytes = JsonSerializer.Serialize(customer, options);

    Console.WriteLine(jsonUtf8Bytes);
}