How to serialize an object to send over network

Question

I\'m trying to serialize objects to send over network through a socket using only STL. I\'m not finding a way to keep objects\' structure to be deserialized in the other host. I

Answer 1

Serializing C++ Objects over a Network Socket

This is 6 years late but I just recently had this problem and this was one of the threads that I came across in my search on how to serialize object through a network socket in C++. This solution uses just 2 or 3 lines of code. There are a lot of answers that I found work but the easiest that I found was to use reinterpret_cast(target) to convert the class or structure into an array of characters and feed it through the socket. Here's an example.

Class to be serialized:

/* myclass.h */

#ifndef MYCLASS_H
#define MYCLASS_H

class MyClass
{
    public:
        int A;
        int B;
        MyClass(){A=1;B=2;}
        ~MyClass(){}
};

#endif

Server Program:

/* server.cpp */

#include "myclass.h"

int main (int argc, char** argv)
{
    // Open socket connection.
    // ...

    // Loop continuously until terminated.
    while(1)
    {
        // Read serialized data from socket.
        char buf[sizeof(MyClass)];
        read(newsockfd,buf, sizeof(MyClass));
        MyClass *msg = reinterpret_cast(buf);  

        std::cout << "A = " << std::to_string(msg->A) << std::endl;
        std::cout << "B = " << std::to_string(msg->B) << std::endl;
    }

    // Close socket connection.
    // ...

    return 0;
}

Client Program:

/* client.cpp */

#include "myClass.h"

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    // Open socket connection.
    // ...

    while(1)
    {
        printf("Please enter the message: ");
        bzero(buffer,256);
        fgets(buffer,255,stdin);

        MyClass msg;
        msg.A = 1;
        msg.B = 2;

        // Write serialized data to socket.
        char* tmp = reinterpret_cast(&msg);
        write(sockfd,tmp, sizeof(MyClass));
    }

    // Close socket connection.
    // ...

    return 0;
}

Compile both server.cpp and client.cpp using g++ with -std=c++11 as an option. You can then open two terminals and run both programs, however, start the server program before the client so that it has something to connect to.

Hope this helps.