Serializing a class which contains a std::string

I’m serializing by casting the class to a char* and writing it to a
file with fstream. Reading of course is just the reverse.

Unfortunately, this only works as long as there are no pointers involved. You might want to give your classes void MyClass::serialize(std::ostream) and void MyClass::deserialize(std::ifstream), and call those. For this case, you’d want

std::ostream& MyClass::serialize(std::ostream &out) const {
    out << height;
    out << ',' //number seperator
    out << width;
    out << ',' //number seperator
    out << name.size(); //serialize size of string
    out << ',' //number seperator
    out << name; //serialize characters of string
    return out;
}
std::istream& MyClass::deserialize(std::istream &in) {
    if (in) {
        int len=0;
        char comma;
        in >> height;
        in >> comma; //read in the seperator
        in >> width;
        in >> comma; //read in the seperator
        in >> len;  //deserialize size of string
        in >> comma; //read in the seperator
        if (in && len) {
            std::vector<char> tmp(len);
            in.read(tmp.data() , len); //deserialize characters of string
            name.assign(tmp.data(), len);
        }
    }
    return in;
}

You may also want to overload the stream operators for easier use.

std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream& out, const MyClass &obj)
{obj.serialize(out); return out;}
std::istream &operator>>(std::istream& in, MyClass &obj)
{obj.deserialize(in); return in;}