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Serializing string arrays in solidity

by Vaibhav SainiJune 2nd, 2018

Too Long; Didn't Read

Solidity is still in development and that’s why it still lacks in a lot of features that a good programming language should have. One of the features which solidity is missing is that it cannot return or take multi-dimensional arrays as input. Well, that does not seem important but when we talk about strings, we realize that they are just arbitrary-length byte array(i.e. <code class="markup--code markup--p-code">byte[]</code>). So when you create a string array, you are creating a two-dimensional byte array(i.e. <code class="markup--code markup--p-code">byte[][]</code>). This is where we all get stuck. Kinda like a trap…

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TL;DR This GitHub repository is all you need.

Solidity is still in development and that’s why it still lacks in a lot of features that a good programming language should have. One of the features which solidity is missing is that it cannot return or take multi-dimensional arrays as input. Well, that does not seem important but when we talk about strings, we realize that they are just arbitrary-length byte array(i.e. byte[]). So when you create a string array, you are creating a two-dimensional byte array(i.e. byte[][]). This is where we all get stuck. Kinda like a trap…

it’s a trap!

That’s enough of talking, let’s get to work. The easiest and the most efficient way to get over this problem is to serialize the strings in the array(converting the strings in the array into byte form) and send all of them in one go. After we receive the string array in the byte form we can either pass the byte array as input to another solidity function or send it to user-end(node.js api) where we will de-serialize it back to the string array. Let’s see how it works.

Step 1: Serialize & De-serialize using solidity

For serializing/de-serializing in solidity we will use Seriality which can be used to serialize and de-serialize any data type in solidity. Thanks to pouladzade.

You will get some output like this (for startindex=1, endindex=2).

0x737472696e6731000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007737472696e6732000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007737472696e6733000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007

Now, pass this bytes buffer into getString()and you will get your strings back!

Note: You have to include Seriality files to your project to make the contract working. You can do that from here.