Can you have a property name containing a dash

Is it possible to create an object with a property name that contains a dash character?

I am creating an anonymous object so that I can serialize it to Json using Json.Net and one of the properties I need contains a '-' dash character.

An example of what I want is:

var document =  {
    condtions = new {
        acl = "public-read",
        bucket = "s3-bucketname",
        starts-with = "test/path"
    }
};

I know I could replace the dash with underscores when creating the object and then replace them in the serialized string afterwards, but wanted to know if there is a way in the language to do this without this workaround.


You can't do this with anonymous objects; field names must be valid identifiers. You could instead use a Dictionary, which Json.Net should serialise just as easily as an anonymous object:

var document = new {
    conditions = new Dictionary<string, string>() {
        { "acl", "public-read" },
        { "bucket", "s3-bucketname" },
        { "starts-with", "test/path" }
    }
};

Not in c#, no. However most serializers allow you to customise this - often via attributes. IIRC with JSON.NET you want [JsonProperty("starts-with")] to specify the name. However you can't use attributes on anonymous types, so you may need to define a class with the properties (and attributes) the you desire.


Unfortunately, that's not possible, because the language would not be able to differentiate the two following expressions:

condition.starts-with;    // Read "starts-with" property.
condition.starts - with;  // Read "starts" property and subtract "with" variable.