DataContractSerializer - how can I output the xml to a string (as opposed to a file)

Question

I had a quick question regarding the datacontractserializer. Maybe it's more of a stream question. I found a piece of code that writes the xml to a filestream. I basically don't want the file and just need the string output.

public static string DataContractSerializeObject<T>(T objectToSerialize)
{   
    var fs = new FileStream("test.xml", FileMode.OpenOrCreate);
    var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));
    serializer.WriteObject(fs, objectToSerialize);
    fs.Close();
    return fs.ToString();
}

fs.ToString() is obviously not what I'm looking for. What stream or writer etc, can I use just to return the proper string and not create a file? I did look at the XML the filestream created and it's exactly what I'm looking for. The XmlSerializer wrote the XML a bit strange and I prefer the output of the DataContractSerializer in this case. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Something like this - put your output into a MemoryStream and then read that back in:

public static string DataContractSerializeObject<T>(T objectToSerialize)
{
    using(MemoryStream memStm = new MemoryStream())
    {
        var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));
        serializer.WriteObject(memStm, objectToSerialize);

        memStm.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

        using(var streamReader = new StreamReader(memStm))
        {
             string result = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
             return result;
        }
    }
}