Hello I am working on something, and I need to be able to be able to add text into a .txt file. Although I have this completed I have a small problem. I need to write the string in the middle of the file more or less. Example:
Hello my name is Brandon,
I hope someone can help, //I want the string under this line.
Thank you.
Hopefully someone can help with a solution.
Edit Alright thanks guys, I'll try to figure it out, probably going to just rewrite the whole file. Ok well the program I am making is related to the hosts file, and not everyone has the same hosts file, so I was wondering if there is a way to read their hosts file, and copy all of it, while adding the string to it?
With regular files there's no way around it - you must read the text that follows the line you wish to append after, overwrite the file, and then append the original trailing text.
Think of files on disk as arrays - if you want to insert some items into the middle of an array, you need to shift all of the following items down to make room. The difference is that .NET offers convenience methods for arrays and Lists that make this easy to do. The file I/O APIs offer no such convenience methods, as far as I'm aware.
When you know in advance you need to insert in the middle of a file, it is often easier to simply write a new file with the altered content, and then perform a rename. If the file is small enough to read into memory, you can do this quite easily with some LINQ:
var allLines = File.ReadAllLines( filename ).ToList();
allLines.Insert( insertPos, "This is a new line..." );
File.WriteAllLines( filename, allLines.ToArray() );
This is the best method to insert a text in middle of the textfile.
string[] full_file = File.ReadAllLines("test.txt");
List<string> l = new List<string>();
l.AddRange(full_file);
l.Insert(20, "Inserted String");
File.WriteAllLines("test.txt", l.ToArray());
one of the trick is file transaction. first you read the file up to the line you want to add text but while reading keep saving the read lines in a separate file for example tmp.txt and then add your desired text to the tmp.txt (at the end of the file) after that continue the reading from the source file till the end. then replace the tmp.txt with the source file. at the end you got file with added text in the middle :)
Check out File.ReadAllLines(). Probably the easiest way.
string[] full_file = File.ReadAllLines("test.txt");
List<string> l = new List<string>();
l.AddRange(full_file);
l.Insert(20, "Inserted String");
File.WriteAllLines("test.txt", l.ToArray());
If you know the line index use readLine until you reach that line and write under it.
If you know exactly he text of that line do the same but compare the text returned from readLine with the text that you are searching for and then write under that line.
Or you can search for the index of a specified string and writ after it using th escape sequence \n.
As others mentioned, there is no way around rewriting the file after the point of the newly inserted text if you must stick with a simple text file. Depending on your requirements, though, it might be possible to speed up the finding of location to start writing. If you knew that you needed to add data after line N, then you could maintain a separate "index" of the offsets of line numbers. That would allow you to seek directly to the necessary location to start reading/writing.
Related
I have a CSV whose author, annoyingly enough, has decided to 'introduce' the file before the contents themselves. So in all, I have a CSV that looks like:
This file was created by XXXXYY and represents the crossover between YY and QQQ.
Additional information can be found through the website GG, blah blah blah...
Jacob, Hybrid
Dan, Pure
Lianne, Hybrid
Jack, Hatchback
So the problem here is that I want to get rid of the first few lines before the 'real content' of the CSV file begins. I'm looking for robustness here, so using Streamreader and removing all content before the 4th line for example, is not ideal (plus the length of the text can vary).
Is there a way in which one can read only what matters and write a new CSV into a directory path?
Regards,
genesis
(edit - I'm looking for C sharp code)
The solution depends on the files you have to parse. You need to look for a reliable pattern that distinguishes data from comment.
In your example, there are some possibilities that might be the same in other files:
there are 4 lines of text. But you say this isn't consistent across files
The text lives may not contain the same number of commas as the data table. But that is unlikely to be reliable for all files.
there is a blank/whitespace only line between the text and the data.
the data appears to be in the form word-comma-word. If this is true it should be easy to identify non data lines (any line which doesn't contain exactly one comma, or has multiple words etc)
You may be able to use a combination of these heuristics to more reliably detect the data.
You could scan by line (looking for the \r\n) and ignore lines that don't have a comma count that matches you csv.
You should be able to read the file into a string pretty easily unless it is really massive.
e.g.
var csv = "some test\r\nsome more text\r\na,b,c\r\nd,e,f\r\n";
var lines = csv.Split('\r\n');
var csvLines = line.Where(l => l.Count(',') == 2);
// now csvLines contains only the lines you are after
List<string> info = new List<string>();
int counter = 0;
// Open the file to read from.
info = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(path).ToList();
// Find the lines up until (& including) the empty one
foreach (string s in info)
{
counter++;
if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
break; //exit from the loop
}
// Remove the lines including the blank one.
info.RemoveRange(0,counter);
Something like this should work, you should probably put some tests in to make sure counter is not > length and other tests to handle errors.
You could adapt this code so that it just finds the empty line number using linq or something, but I don't like the overhead of linq (Yeah ironic considering I'm using c#).
Regards,
Slipoch
I'm using StreamReader.ReadLine() in C# to read through a text file to find the specific content like "Step-xx" and then read and use the contents that point to the next occurrence of "Step-xx+1". I know the occurrence of the "Step-xx" line is 100 lines apart in my textfile. How can I jump to line 2500 and read the contents following "Step-25", rather than reading 2500 lines and comparing it to "Step-25", which I'm doing now. I need to speed up this search.
Thanks.
Files are not lines based (or even character based), so you can't skip to a specific line in a file.
If you really need to skip ahead in the file, you would need to make a guess where the 2500th line might start based on average line lengths, seek to that position and start reading. You would need to use a FileStream directly, not a StreamReader, and read the file as bytes. You would be looking for the 0x0d 0x0a byte combination that is used as newline in a Windows text file. When you have the bytes between two newlines, you can decode them into a string and look for the Step-xx markers.
Thanks for all the replies. This will do the trick.
string line = File.ReadLines(FileName).Skip(14).Take(1).First();
I need to figure out how changing from StreamReader to ReadLines would impact other things.
Thanks again
I currently have two strings assigned - domain,subdomain
How could I delete any matched occurrences of these strings in a text file?
string domain = "127.0.0.1 test.com"
string subdomain = "127.0.0.1 sub.test.com"
I don't think using a regex would be ideal in this situation.
How can this be done?
You need to:
Open the existing file for input
Open a new file for output
Repeatedly:
Read a line of text from the input
See if it matches your pattern (it's unclear at the moment what pattern you're looking for)
If it doesn't, write the line to the output (or if you're only trying to remove bits of lines, work out which bit you want to write out)
Close both the input and output (a using statement will do this automatically)
Optionally delete the original file and rename the new one if you want to effectively replace the original.
var result = Regex.Replace(File.ReadAllText("file.txt"),
#"127\.0\.0\.1 test\.com|127\.0\.0\.1 sub\.test\.com", string.Empty);
Then write to file obtained result.
I am looking for a way to search a comma separated txt file for a keyword, and then replace another keyword on that exact line. For example if i have the following line in a big txt file:
Help, 0
I want to find this line in the txt (by telling program to look for the first word 'help') and replace the 0 with 1 to indicate that i have read it once so it looks like:
Help, 1
Thanks
It is generally a very bad idea to try and overwrite data in the same file: if your code throws an exception, you'll be left with a partially processed file; if your search target and replacement value have different lengths, you have to re-write the rest of the file. Note that these don't apply in your specific situation - but it's best not to let it become habit.
My recommendation:
Open both the input file and a temporary file (Path.GetTempFileName)
process and write each line ( StreamReader.ReadLine)
When finished with no errors, rename the original file to something like origFile.old
rename the temporary file to the original file name.
If something goes wrong, delete the temporary file and exit. This way the original file is left intact in the event of an error.
If you want to do the replacement "in place" (meaning you don't want to use another, temporary, file) then you would do so with a FileStream.
You have a couple of options, you can Read through the file stream until you find the text that you're looking for, then issue a Write. Keep in mind that FileStream works at the byte level, so you'll need to take character encoding into consideration. Encoding.GetString will do the conversion.
Alternatively, you can search for the text, and note its position. Then you can open a FileStream and just Seek to that position. Then you can issue the Write.
This may be the most efficient way, but it's definitely more challenging then the naive option. With the naive implementation, you:
Read the entire file into memory (File.ReadAllText)
Perform the replace (Regex.Replace)
Write it back to disk (File.WriteAllText)
There's no second file, but you are bound by the amount of memory the system has. If you know you're always dealing with small files, then this could be an option. Otherwise, you need to read up on character encoding and file streams.
Here's another SO question on the topic (including sample code): Editing a text file in place through C#
How do you specify where to start reading in a file when using StreamReader?
I have created a streamreader object, along with a file stream object. After both objects are created, how would I go upon controlling where I want the StreamReader to start reading from a file?
Let's say the file's contents are as follows,
// song list.
// junk info.
1. Song Name
2. Song Name
3. Song Name
4. Song Name
5. Song Name
6. Song Name
How would I control the streamreader to read from let's say #2? Also, how could I also control where to make it stop reading by a similar delimiter like at #5?
Edit: By delimiter I mean, a way to make StreamReader start reading from ('2.')
Are you trying to deserialize a file into some in-memory object? If so, you may want to simply parse the entire file in using ReadLine or something similar, store each line, and then access it via a data structure such as a KeyValuePair<int, string>.
Update: Ok... With the new info, I think you have two options. If you're looking at reading until you find a match, you can Peek(), check to see if the character is the one you're looking for, and then Read(). Alternatively, if you're looking for a set position, you can simply Read() that many characters and throw away the return value.
If you're looking for complex delimiter, you can read the entire line or even the entire file into memory and use Regular Expressions.
Hope that helps...
If the file contains new line delimiters you can use ReadLine to read a line at a time.
So to start reading at line #2, you would read the first line and discard and then read lines until line #5.
Well if the content is just plain text like that, you should use the StreamReader's ReadLine method.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.streamreader.readline.aspx
-Oisin