Serializing and unserializing an array in javascript

Question

I\'m using the tag-it library for jquery to make a tagging system (a bit like the stackoverflow one).

After the user types his tags the library returns a javascript arra

Answer 1

You can use JavaScript Object Notation(JSON) format.

Javascript supports these methods:

• JSON.stringify -> serializes object to string

• JSON.parse -> deserializes object from string

Answer 2

You can use JSON.stringify() (MDN docu) and JSON.parse() (MDN docu) for converting a JavaScript object into a string representation to store it inside a database.

var arr = [ 1, 2, 3 ];

var serializedArr = JSON.stringify( arr );
// "[1, 2, 3]"

var unpackArr = JSON.parse( serializedArr );
// identical array to arr

If your backend is written in PHP, there are similar methods to work with JSON strings there: json_encode() (PHP docu) and json_decode() (PHP docu).

Most other languages offer similar functionalities for JSON strings.

Answer 3

How about just JSONing it?

var arr = [1,2,3];
var arrSerialized = JSON.stringify(arr);
...

var arrExtracted = JSON.parse(arrSerialized);

By the way, JSON is often used for serializing in some other languages, even though they have their own serializing functions. )