Friendly (De)Serializer

Introduction

Normal JSON serialization involves a lot of braces and quotation marks. These clutter up urls and make them far less human readable. This library uses encodeURIComponent() to encode values but aims to make objects more accessible in urls.

The object { "a": "b", "c": "d" } becomes a=b&c=d.

Nested objects are marked by dots.

serialize({ "a": { "b": "c" } })
// "a.b=c"

Arrays are just numeric keys (also marked by dots). The deserializer will create an array if the key is numeric. For this reason, the deserializer does not support objects that have only numeric keys because it will assume they are arrays.

serialize({ "a": [ "b", "c" ] })
// a.0=b&a.1=c

Arrays can contain objects.

serialize({ "a": [ { "b": "c" }, { "d": "e" } ] })
// a.0.b=c&a.1.d=e

Installation

Install friendly-serializer from npm.

npm install friendly-serializer

Usage

If you are controlling to GET on the client and are handling deserialization on the server, you can do something like this:

import { serialize, deserialize } from "friendly-serializer"

const str = serialize({
    "name": "John Doe",
    "age": 42,
    "address": {
        "street": "123 Main Street",
        "city": "Anytown",
        "state": "CA",
        "phoneNumbers": [
            "123-456-7890",
            "234-567-8901"
        ]
    }
})
// name=John%20Doe&age=42&address.street=123%20Main%20Street&address.city=Anytown&address.state=CA&address.phoneNumbers.0=123-456-7890&address.phoneNumbers.1=234-567-8901

deserialize(str)
// {
//     "name": "John Doe",
//     "age": 42,
//     "address": {
//         "street": "123 Main Street",
//         "city": "Anytown",
//         "state": "CA",
//         "phoneNumbers": [
//             "123-456-7890",
//             "234-567-8901"
//         ]
//     }
// }

If you are using express, the req.query object will be available to you. But express doesn't know about friendly serialization so the object will be deserialized incorrectly. To handle this, you can use the convertDeserializedQueryObject() helper function.

import { convertDeserializedQueryObject } from "friendly-serializer"

const handleGet = async (req, res) => {
    console.log(req.query)
    // {
    //     "name": "John Doe",
    //     "age": 42,
    //     "address.street": "123 Main Street",
    //     "address.city": "Anytown",
    //     "address.state": "CA",
    //     "address.phoneNumbers.0": "123-456-7890",
    //     "address.phoneNumbers.1": "234-567-8901"
    // }
    const query = convertDeserializedQueryObject(req.query)
    console.log(query)
    // {
    //     "name": "John Doe",
    //     "age": 42,
    //     "address": {
    //         "street": "123 Main Street",
    //         "city": "Anytown",
    //         "state": "CA",
    //         "phoneNumbers": [
    //             "123-456-7890",
    //             "234-567-8901"
    //         ]
    //     }
    // }
}