Deserialize Json in C# - How to Handle null Return Values

Question

I am using the following code:

myObj jsonStream = ser.Deserialize<myObj>(jsonStream);

And all was working fine until the JSON that came back had a null value for one of the fields. i.e.:

"name" : null

During the deserialization process, it's throwing an exception. In my myObj, I have a member:

public string name;

How can I gracefully handle the odd null value coming back from my datasource using the System.Web.Script.Serialization assembly? I tried:

public string name = "";

But that didn't work.

Answer 1

Try to use nullable type

public string? name;

Answer 2

Maybe the problem lies somewhere else because the following code worked fine for me using JavaScriptSerializer (it correctly handled the null without throwing any exception):

public class MyObj
{
    public string name;
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        JavaScriptSerializer ser = new JavaScriptSerializer();
        var json = "{\"name\" : null}";
        var myObj = ser.Deserialize<MyObj>(json);
        Console.WriteLine(myObj.name);
    }
}