Serializing to JSON in jQuery [duplicate]

Answer 1

It's basically 2 step process:

First, you need to stringify like this:

var JSON_VAR = JSON.stringify(OBJECT_NAME, null, 2); 

After that, you need to convert the string to Object:

var obj = JSON.parse(JSON_VAR);

Answer 2

If you don't want to use external libraries there is .toSource() native JavaScript method, but it's not perfectly cross-browser.

Answer 3

One thing that the above solutions don't take into account is if you have an array of inputs but only one value was supplied.

For instance, if the back end expects an array of People, but in this particular case, you are just dealing with a single person. Then doing:

<input type="hidden" name="People" value="Joe" />

Then with the previous solutions, it would just map to something like:

{
    "People" : "Joe"
}

But it should really map to

{
    "People" : [ "Joe" ]
}

To fix that, the input should look like:

<input type="hidden" name="People[]" value="Joe" />

And you would use the following function (based off of other solutions, but extended a bit)

$.fn.serializeObject = function() {
var o = {};
var a = this.serializeArray();
$.each(a, function() {
    if (this.name.substr(-2) == "[]"){
        this.name = this.name.substr(0, this.name.length - 2);
        o[this.name] = [];
    }

    if (o[this.name]) {
        if (!o[this.name].push) {
            o[this.name] = [o[this.name]];
        }
        o[this.name].push(this.value || '');
    } else {
        o[this.name] = this.value || '';
    }
});
return o;
};

Answer 4

Yes, you should JSON.stringify and JSON.parse your Json_PostData before calling $.ajax:

$.ajax({
        url:    post_http_site,  
        type: "POST",         
        data:   JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(Json_PostData)),       
        cache: false,
        error: function (xhr, ajaxOptions, thrownError) {
            alert(" write json item, Ajax error! " + xhr.status + " error =" + thrownError + " xhr.responseText = " + xhr.responseText );    
        },
        success: function (data) {
            alert("write json item, Ajax  OK");

        } 
});

Answer 5

No, the standard way to serialize to JSON is to use an existing JSON serialization library. If you don't wish to do this, then you're going to have to write your own serialization methods.

If you want guidance on how to do this, I'd suggest examining the source of some of the available libraries.

EDIT: I'm not going to come out and say that writing your own serliazation methods is bad, but you must consider that if it's important to your application to use well-formed JSON, then you have to weigh the overhead of "one more dependency" against the possibility that your custom methods may one day encounter a failure case that you hadn't anticipated. Whether that risk is acceptable is your call.