Reading from text file creates three dots - c#

I am reading a long text file containing a sql query using StreamReader then using StringBuilder to create a string that gets run against a database. Once the string is created I checked the value and three dots ... appear within the string causing the query to fail when I run it against the database. Why is this happening? What can I do to keep it from happening?
string script;
if (File.Exists(path))
{
using(StreamReader sr = File.OpenText(path))
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
while(!sr.EndOfStream)
{
sb.Append(sr.ReadLine());
}
script = sb.ToString();
}
}
UPDATE: I should add that the three dots appear at character position 16384 every time. Not sure of the significance of this
UPDATE: It appears the string is being truncated at runtime. the file contiains 48080 characters but is being truncated in the middle at position 16384 making the string variable 32768.. Is this the max character count for a string?

I have a definite answer for you: Microsoft says that what you are experiencing is a bug in Visual Studio 2015. They have released an "Update 2" for Visual Studio 2015 that is reported to correct the issue.
I am trying to get this update installed by my admin, but in the meantime, a feasible workaround is to load the text in the JSON Visualizer instead. It will show an error that it is, of course, not valid JSON since it is SQL, but it will display the whole text of the string.
Download Update 2 from here:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-update2-vs.aspx
See the bug report here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/2016177/text-visualizer-misses-corrupts-text-in-long-strings

I had the same problem while I was debugging the very long query string.
It turns out, Visual Studio(mine is 2015) Debugger will truncate long strings after certain amount of characters for ease of reading. So even though you are seeing three dots(...) in Text Visualizer, actual value doesn't have that three dots.
To my knowledge, visual studio 2012 debugger doesn't add three dots. I haven't found a way how to turn the feature off in VS2015, but you can use html visualizer or json visualizer as alternative solution.

I have a feeling that you are checking the values in your debugger, where the long query text is being partially shown and ends with an ellipsis (...)
Again guessing here, but seems like you join your lines of SQL into one single line, and if the lines in the file do not end with whitespace character, then the query will get messed up. Probably that is the reason why your SQL query does not work.
By the way, you can write the code you have far more succinctly as below
if (File.Exists(path))
script = string.Join(" ", File.ReadLines(path));

Related

Why does the Notepad++ [NULL] character not paste?

I am new to this site, and I don't know if I am providing enough info - I'll do my best =)
If you use Notepad++, then you will know what I am talking about -- When a user loads a .exe into Notepad++, the NUL / \x0 character is replaced by NULL, which has a black background, and white text. I tried pasting it into Visual Studio, hoping to obtain the same output, but it just pasted some spaces...
Does anyone know if this is a certain key-combination, or something? I would like to put the NULL character in replacement of \x0, just like Notepad++ =)
Notepad++ is a rich text editor unlike your regular notepad. It can display custom graphics so common in all modern text editors. While reading a file whenever notepad++ encounters the ASCII code of a null character then instead of displaying nothing it adds the string "NULL" to the UI setting the text background colour to black and text colour to white which is what you are seeing. You can show any custom style in your rich text editor too.
NOTE: This is by no means an efficient solution. I'm clearly traversing a read string 2 times just to take benefit of already present methods. This can be done manually in a single pass. It is just to give a hint about how you can do it. Also I wrote the code carefully but haven't ran it because I don't have the tools at the moment. I apologise for any mistakes let me know I'll update it
Step 1 : Read a text file by line (line ends at '\n') and replace all instances of null character of that line with the string "NUL" using the String.Replace(). Finally append the modified text to your RichTextBox.
Step 2 : Re traverse your read line using String.IndexOf() finding start indexes of each "NUL" word. Using these indexed you select text from RichTextBox and then style that selected text using RichTextBox.SelectionColor and RichTextBox.SelectionBackColor
richTextBoxCursor basically just represents the start index of each line in RichTextBox
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(#"c:\test.txt" , Encoding.UTF8);
int richTextBoxCursor = 0;
while (!sr.EndOfStream){
richTextBoxCursor = richTextBox.TextLength;
string line = sr.ReadLine();
line = line.Replace(Convert.ToChar(0x0).ToString(), "NUL");
richTextBox.AppendText(line);
i = 0;
while(true){
i = line.IndexOf("NUL", i) ;
if(i == -1) break;
// This specific select function select text start from a certain start index to certain specified character range passed as second parameter
// i is the start index of each found "NUL" word in our read line
// 3 is the character range because "NUL" word has three characters
richTextBox.Select(richTextBoxCursor + i , 3);
richTextBox.SelectionColor = Color.White;
richTextBox.SelectionBackColor = Color.Black;
i++;
}
}
Notepad++ may use custom or special fonts to show these particular characters. This behavior also may not appropriate for all text editors. So, they don't show them.
If you want to write a text editor that visualize these characters, you probably need to implement this behavior programmatically. Seeing notepad++ source can be helpful If you want.
Text editor
As far as I know in order to make Visual Studio display non printable characters you need to install an extension from the marketplace at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com.
One such extension, which I have neither tried nor recomend - I just did a quick search and this is the first result - is
Invisible Character Visualizer.
Having said that, copy-pasting binaries is a risky business.
You may try Edit > Advanced > View White Space first.
Binary editor
To really see what's going on you could use the VS' binary editor: File->Open->(Open with... option)->Binary Editor -> OK
To answer your question.
It's a symbolic representation of 00H double byte.
You're copying and pasting the values. Notepad++ is showing you symbols that replace the representation of those values (because you configured it to do so in that IDE).

Reading particular lines in a text file

I've been having some problems extracting particular lines in a txt file.
I'm using the file to store user names for a login program.
The program will know what line to go to in the text file but I don't know how to actually get the wanted line out and put the resulting string into a variable.
Code I'm using to pull file into a variable is:
string usernameFile = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(#"Usernames.txt");
My real problem is that code two lines below doesn't work in my visual studios community version 2017:
File.ReadLine
I don't know if I need to install something else onto my visual studios but any method to be able to read a particular line of a txt file will be fine.
Use File.ReadAllLines instead. That gives you an array of strings, one for each line.
string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines("Usernames.txt");
string username = lines[2]; // or whatever.
You can use LINQ to avoid reading the entire file:
var line = File.ReadLines("Usernames.txt").Skip(2).First();

C# verbatim string literal not working. Very Strange backslash always double

I've tried for quite a long time to figure out whats going on but I've not found anything anywhere that someone besides me has ran into this issue.
I'm simply trying to hard code a path into a string. Easy stuff. Well for some reason
string fullPathSourceFile = #"c:\SQLSOURCE.txt";
is evaluating to c:\\SQLSOURCE.txt
I've tried everything to evaluated it to a single backslash remove the double quotes and it wont work. I even tried Replace(#"\\", #"\") and it has no affect. Anyone have any idea what's going on with my code that would force a double backslash when a single one should be evaluated? This is driving me nuts and it's so damn easy yet causing me a lot of frustration.
I'm then using the string variable below:
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fullPathSourceFile))
{
string line;
while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
{
sqlDBsource = line.ToString();
}
reader.Close();
}
Thanks to everyone for their input which helped my figure out what I was doing wrong. In Visual Studio (which is confusing) when you look at the value of a string in the debugger, it puts escapes in for you, so a double-backslash in a watch window or variable value popup is normal and does not mean there are actually two backslashes. When you mouse-over the variable or watch it in the watch window, click the magnifying glass icon at the right hand side of the tooltip/pane, this will show you the unescaped string at it would be printed to the console. Another way to display the actual results is: Console.WriteLine(the_problem_string); The issue I was having with the code is outside the scope of the post but the confusion of the results I was seeing from Visual Studio lead me to believe the string was the source of the problem when it wasn't.
This was a weird one. So I removed the verbatim as suggested in the comments and it worked when I used the double backslashes in the string. For some reason the code did not like the verbatim string and was translating the backslashes incorrectly. This resolved the issue. If anyone runs in to this you may need to play with the verbatim/non-verbatim strings because in some circumstances the compiler prefers non-verbatim.

New code Lines in c# project is not executed

I`m a new guy to c# and I try to add a some code to a certain class in my c# project in order to remove some characters from a string. These lines of codes are not executed at run time and the debugger steps over it.So,
1) How to make the new lines added to an existing project execute?
2) Is there a property in Visual studio 2005 that prevents developers from changing existing code?
3) Is it some Property related to the c# project that specifies a privilege of code change?
you should try cleaning your project and rebuilding it, sometimes visual studio is stupid and does not rebuild all the assemblies. i find that this fixes this problem about 80% of the time (if it's not my code, that is)
1) Just rebuild entire solution
2) No, as far as I know
3) No, as far as I know
Check to make sure you are not returning the a value before the added lines. If you hit a return prior to getting to those new lines that will exit the function and your new code will never execute.
Since you mentioned string, are you assigning the output back to the variable?
E.g.
string aStr = " abcdefg ";
aStr = aStr.Trim();
If you only do aStr.Trim(), you won't see the "update".
"\0" has a particular meaning in C# strings. Are you actually trying to remove the null character, or are there literal backslashes and zeroes?
If you're trying to remove a backslash and then a zero, try this instead:
string sMailMsg = eMailMsg.ToString().Replace("\\0", string.Empty);

I think this is some kind of encoding problem

I have two computers. Both running WinXP SP2 (I don't really know ho similar they are beyond that). I am running MS Visual C# 2008 express edition on both and that's what I'm currently using to program.
I made an application that loads in an XML file and displays the contents in a DataGridView.
The first line of my xml file is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...and really... it's utf-8 (at least according to MS VS C# when I just open the file there).
I compile the code and run it on one computer, and the contents of my DataGridView appears normal. No funny characters. I compile the code and run it on the other computer (or just take the published version from computer #1 and install it on computer #2 - I tried this both ways) and in the datagridview, where there are line breaks/new lines in the xml file, I see funny square characters.
I'm a novice to encoding... so the only thing I really tried to troubleshoot was to use that same program to write the contents of my xml to a new xml file (but I'm actually writing it to a text file, with the xml tags in it) since the default writing to a text file seems to be utf-8. Then I read this new file back in to my program. I get the same results.
I don't know what else to do or how to troubleshoot this or what I might fundamentally be doing wrong in the first place.
-Adeena
This doesn't have to do with UTF-8 or character encodings - this problem has to do with line endings. In Windows, each line of a text file ends in the two characters carriage-return (CR) and newline (LF, for line feed), which are code points U+000D and U+000A respectively. In ASCII and UTF-8, these are encoded as the two bytes 0D 0A. Most non-Windows systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, on the other hand, uses just a newline character to signal end-of-line, so it's not uncommon to see line ending problems when transferring text files between Windows and non-Windows systems.
However, since you're using just Windows on both systems, this is more of a mystery. One application is correctly interpreting the CRLF combination as a newline, but the other application is confused by the CR. Carriage returns are not printable characters, so it replaces the CR with a placeholder box, which is what you see; it then correctly interprets the line feed as the end-of-line.
The square usually appears when you use different types of newlines.
Linux - (0A) LF
Win - (0D0A) CRLF
Mac - (0D) CR
The app was probably created using 1 type and the running app is expecting another.
Check out Environment.NewLine
And, you might try this: (no guarantees -- I don't write much C#)
strInput = Regex.Replace(strInput, "\\r?\\n?", Environment.NewLine)
I'm not sure of the cause of your problem, but one solution would be to to just strip out the carriage returns from your strings. For every string you add, just call TrimEnd(null) on it to remove trailing whitespace:
newrow["topic"] = att1.ToString().TrimEnd(null);
If your strings might end in other whitespace (i.e. spaces or tabs) and you want to keep those, then just pass an array containing only the carriage return character to TrimEnd:
newrow["topic" = att1.ToString().TrimEnd(new Char[]{'\r'});
Disclaimer: I am not a C# programmer; the second statement may be syntactically incorrect
# Adam:
Sorry! Missed your earlier statement.
To load the document into the program and display in the DataGridView, I am currently doing (I say "currently", because I tried other things like use XDocument instead of Xelement):
XElement xe1 = XElement.Load(filePath);
DataTable myTable = new DataTable();
myTable = mkTable(); // calls a function that makes the table
var _categories = (from p1 in xe1.Descendants("category") select p1);
int numCat = _categories.Count();
int i = 0;
while (i < numCat)
{
DataRow newrow;
newrow = myTable.NewRow();
if (_categories.ElementAt(i).Parent.Name == "topic")
{
string att1 = _categories.ElementAt(i).Parent.Attribute("name").Value.ToString();
newrow["topic"] = att1.ToString();
}
// repeat the above for the different things in my document
myTable.Rows.Add(newrow);
i++;
}
myDataSet.Merge(myTable);
bindingSourceIn.DataSource = myDataSet;
myDataGridView.DataSource = bindingSourceIn;
myDataGridView.DataMember = "xmlthing";
(obviously things are a little abbreviated here... i.e., my bindingsource/datagridview etc is declared elsewhere.... but hopefully this is enough to make sense)
-Adeena

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