Reading From a Text File in C Sharp

Text files provide a common denominator format where both people and programs can read and understand. The .NET Framework includes convenience classes that make reading and writing text files very easy. The following sequence outlines the basic steps necessary to work with text files:

1. Open the file
2. Read/Write to the file
3. Close the file

It's that simple. Listing 1 shows how to write text data to a file.

 Reading Text Data from a File: TextFileReader.cs

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace csharp_station.howto
{
   class TextFileReader
   {
       static void Main(string[] args)
       {
            // create reader & open file
            Textreader tr = new StreamReader("date.txt");

           // read a line of text
            Console.WriteLine(tr.ReadLine());

            // close the stream
            tr.Close();
       }
   }
}
In Listing 2, the text file is opened in a manner similar to the method used in Listing 1, except it uses a StreamReader class constructor to create an instance of a Textreader. The StreamReader class includes additional overloads that allow you to specify the file in different ways, text format encoding, and buffer info. This program opens the date.txt file, which should be in the same directory as the executable file:
           Textreader tr = new StreamReader("date.txt");
Within a Console.WriteLine statement, the program reads a line of text from the file, using the ReadLine() method of the Textreader instance. The Textreader class also includes methods that allow you to invoke the Read() method to read one or more character or use the Peek() method to see what the next character is without pulling it from the stream. Here's the code that reads an entire line from the text file:
           Console.WriteLine(tr.ReadLine());
When done reading, you should close the file as follows:
           tr.Close();