Serializing a c++ class

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How to serialize in c++ ?

I have a class

    Class Person
    {
      int age;
      char *name;

      char* Serialize()
      {
        //Need to convert age and name to char* eg:21Jeeva
      }
      void DeSerialize(char *data)
      {
        //Need to populate age and name from the data
      }
    };

In C# we can use MemoryStream,BinrayWriter/BinaryReader to achieve this. In c++ somewhere i found we can use iostream to achieve it. But couldnt able to get a proper example of it.

The purpose of the code is after calling serialize i am going to send the data over socket and in receiving end ill call DeSerialize to populate the members back.

Björn Pollex · Answer 1 · 2011-04-11T11:06:01.997

You could take a look at Boost.Serialization. If you only need a simple text-serialization based on iostreams, you probably want to overload the stream extraction operators. For serialization this could look like this:

std::ostream & operator<<(std::ostream & stream, const Person & person) {
    stream << person.age << " " << person.name;
    return stream;
}

You have to make this function a friend of Person for this to work.

For deserialization, you would use this:

std::istream & operator>>(std::istream & stream, Person & person) {
    stream >> person.age >> person.name;
    return stream;
}

Using these, you can do the following:

Person fred;
fred.name = "Fred";
fred.age = 24;

std::stringstream buffer;
buffer << fred << std::endl;

Person fred_copy;
buffer >> fred;

You can find a small working example here.

Overloading these operators has the advantage that you can for instance use std::copy with an std::ostream_iterator to serialize an entire collection of Persons in one statement.

@Jeeva: This serializes to text, so endianess will not be a problem. — Björn Pollex, Apr 11 '11 at 11:25
Serialziation to text will not help. Since if the value is 100 i need to send it as 3 bytes but rather i want to send it as a single byte. — Jeeva, Apr 12 '11 at 06:11

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 11 '11 at 11:32

You can use following wrapper to convert any datatype to character stream:

template<class TYPE>
string ToChar (const TYPE& value)
{
  stringstream ss;
  ss << value;
  return ss.str();
}

You can use the string object the way you want; like convert into char stream using c_str() or copy into array and so on.

Serializing a c++ class

2 Answers2