Convert UI Text into string?

Hi everyone.

Ok, I had already looked all around web and I can’t see how I can solve this. Also, I have to say I am a beginner yet in codding, so please, if you could explain what is going on I will really appreciate it.

I am trying to save some data with Unity Serialization, which I am learning from this tutorial from Unity Site (here)

In-scene I have three Input Fields which I am trying to take its data referring to them with “public Text xxx;”. I placed the code into a GameObject which I called “SaveLoad”, and am placing The Text from the input field into the references I created into the script.

I discovered that unity can’t serialize Input Field, Text, GameObject, etc, but can do with strings. So I was wondering, is there a way for convert or transform this Text into string, if yes, how can I do that?

The Code:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;
using System.IO;
using UnityEngine.UI;

public class saveLoad : MonoBehaviour {

	public Text companyName;
	public Text ownerName;
	public Text location;

   public void saveData()
    {
       
		BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
		FileStream file = File.Create(Application.persistentDataPath + "/slot1.dat");

		gameData gd = new gameData();
		gd.companyName = companyName;
		gd.ownerName = ownerName;
		gd.location = location;

		bf.Serialize (file, gd);
		file.Close();
    }

   public void loadData()
    {

		if (File.Exists (Application.persistentDataPath + "/slot1.dat")) 
		{

			BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
			FileStream file = File.Open (Application.persistentDataPath + "/slot1.dat", FileMode.Open);
			gameData gd = (gameData)bf.Deserialize(file);
			file.Close();

			companyName = gd.companyName;
			ownerName = gd.ownerName;
			location = gd.location;

		}

   }
}

[Serializable]
class gameData
{
	public Text companyName;
	public Text ownerName;
	public Text location;
}

Thanks.

Is this what you need?

Unity 2019.1 and before

UGUI package (for Unity 2019.2+)
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.ugui@1.0/api/UnityEngine.UI.InputField.html#UnityEngine_UI_InputField_text