C# reading a text file into a string

If the needed data is in specific positions in the file, this is certainly the way to go as it keeps the memory usage down. I made a comparison between a ReadAllText and StreamBuffer for a 2Mb csv and it seemed that the difference was quite small but ReadAllText seemed to take the upper hand from the times taken to complete functions.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How to read an entire file to a string using C? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 4 months ago.

Active 1 year, 11 months ago. Viewed k times. What is the quickest way to read a text file into a string variable? Improve this question. Breeze 1, 2 2 gold badges 31 31 silver badges 39 39 bronze badges. Check this stackoverflow. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. KyleMit Not the best function to use, though. As Devendra D. Chavan points out in his answer, StreamReader. ReadToEnd is more efficient. OwenBlacker It depends on whether "quickest" means "least time to execute" or "least time to understand.

ReadAllText is definitively the easiest one to use, but as "Devendra D. Chavan" points out, it is not the fastest. So if you are reading small files, then it would be a better choice to use File. To read from the server check this , hope helps someone. OwenBlacker -- are you sure? The benchmark shows that StreamReader.

Which is to be expected, as the latter also splits the text into lines. But we are talking about a different method, ReadAllText. ReadToEnd internally. Show 1 more comment. StreamReader approach As the File.

In this article we show how to read text files in C. C tutorial is a comprehensive tutorial on C language. A Stream is an abstract base class of all streams. Stream provides a generic interface to the types of input and output, and isolate the programmer from the specific details of the operating system and the underlying devices.

For instance, MemoryStream works with data located in the memory and FileStream with data in a files. The File. After finishing the iteration, it closes the file. ReadAllLines method, you can find implementation similar to this.

As it was previously written, the using statement disposes StreamReader and FileStream which closes the file. To reduce memory usage for large text files , you can process lines immediately instead of adding it to the list as in the previous example. To do that use File. This method internally creates Enumerator. In few previous articles, I have explained how we can read JSON data in C and how to read excel file in C , now in this article, I have provided code sample using console application to show how to read a text file in C line by line or reading entire text file as a string in one by go using C.

Let's a look at each of the example code, one in which text file is read and converted into string, i. ReadAllText and another is reading text file line by line using System. ReadAllLines which returns array of line , and we can loop that array to print each line of text file. In this example, we will read a text file line by line using System. ReadALLLines in console application. In the above, code we are using foreach loop to read all lines of an string array.

There is one more way to read lines of a text file in C , which is using StreamReader. StreamReader class implements a TextReader that reads characters from a byte stream in a particular encoding.