Tricks of Serialization in Unity/C#

Tricks of Serialization in Unity/C#

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Don’t use XmlSerializer

• XmlSerializer + StringWriter is sloooooow
• XmlSerializer does NOT require [Serializable]
• XmlSerializer does NOT support ISerializable

Use BinaryFormatter + MemoryStream. It’s fast and customizable.

Use System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch for simple profile.

Use Encoding.ASCII.GetString() to convert MemorySteam to string
Use Convert.ToBase64String for binary data that contains ‘\0’

IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
formatter.Serialize(stream, target);
string result = Convert.ToBase64String(stream.ToArray());
//string result = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(stream.ToArray());

Another “trick” for BinaryFormatter in Unity/iOS :
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/30930/why-did-my-binaryserialzer-stop-working.html

// Just add the following line to the Awake() function of the MonoBehaviour
// script and the BinaryFormatter should work fine on iOS. 
// Forces a different code path in the BinaryFormatter that doesn't rely on 
// run-time code generation (which would break on iOS).
Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("MONO_REFLECTION_SERIALIZER", "yes")