用XML表示RESTful服务的List的最佳方法是什么，这样反序列化将更容易

Question

I use two programming languages: Java and C#, and the two communicating through a RESTful service. From Java, I sent some XML for a request made by the C# program, and the response for the GET include some list structure.

<X>
    <A>[3, 18, 11, 8, 19, 6]</A>
</X>
<X>
    <A>[3, 18, 11, 8, 19, 6]</A>
</X>

I have a difficult time parsing the string back into the list, not really difficult, but so manual. What I do is:

    public RoutingResults(String A) 
    {
        A = A.Replace("[", "");
        A = A.Replace("]", "");
        A = A.Replace(" ", "");
        String[] As = A.Split(new String[] {","}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

        this.A = new List<string>();
        foreach (String ax in As)
        {
            this.As.Add(ax);
        }
    }

I think the code above is so funny, don't you think so? I feel so embarrassed if someone would someday hack into my PC and know that I had to code something that way. Haha.

So my question is, especially to you who are experienced with RESTful, and REST world, and XML, and anything is in that part of technology; what would be the ideal way to represent list in the XML for REST, and it would later be ideal as well to deserialize. Please give certain code to exemplify, whether in C# xor Java.

If I had to sent the response like this:

 <X>
      <A>
          <as>3</as>
          <as>18</as>
          <as>11</as>
          <as>8</as>
          <as>19</as>
          <as>6</as>
      <A>
 </X>

I think sending data like the above format would impose a performance penalty; compared if data is formatted neatly, just a .toString representation of a typical java.util.List. Don't you think so?

Answer 1

I wouldn't have said there is much wrong with the original code to be honest. It does the job, it's only a few lines and it's clear how it does it. You could change the last bit to:

this.A = new List<string>(As);

...as the constructor of List<T> is able to take an array as an input and populate itself automatically.

You could also look into sending it as a JSON array, which would be similar and would not involve a lot of extra XML tags. See converting an array in a json string into a list .