For the past few weeks, I've been writing about a series of helper functions I wrote for serializing form data:

At the weekend, I encapsulated them into a tiny form serialization library called Serialize.js. The minified and gzipped file weighs less than 500 bytes! 😱

Let me show you how it works.

Include the script

The easiest way to get started is by using the jsDelivr CDN:

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@kieranbarker/serialize@1/dist/serialize.min.js"></script>

You can also download the files directly from GitHub or use your favourite package manager. Check the documentation to learn more.

Instantiate the library

To create a new instance, just instantiate the class using the new operator, passing in an HTMLFormElement.

You can select the form any way you like, such as using the document.forms property or the document.querySelector() method:

// Using the document.forms property
const serialize = new Serialize(document.forms[0]);

// Using the document.querySelector() method
const serialize2 = new Serialize(document.querySelector('form'));

Use the instance methods

Once you've created an instance, you have four methods available to you: string(), array(), object(), and json().

To use them in practice, you would probably do something like this:

document.forms[0].addEventListener('submit', function (event) {
// Prevent the default submission
event.preventDefault();

// Create a new Serialize instance
const serialize = new Serialize(this);

// Log the results of the instance methods
console.log(serialize.string());
console.log(serialize.array());
console.log(serialize.object());
console.log(serialize.json());
});

If you didn't need all of the methods, there would be no point in saving the instance to a variable, so you could just do something like this instead:

document.forms[0].addEventListener('submit', function (event) {
// Prevent the default submission
event.preventDefault();

// Serialize the data into a query string
const data = new Serialize(this).string();

// Log the data
console.log(data);
});

You can view a demo on CodePen.

If you're curious, you can also view the source code on GitHub.