C# Read Text File – Whole Content
To read a text file using C# programming, follow these steps.
- Import System.IO. We are going to use File class.
- Use File.ReadAllText() method with path to the file and encoding passed as arguments.
- ReadAllText() returns a string which is the whole text in the text file.
Program.cs
using System.IO; using System.Text; namespace CSharpExamples { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string textFileContent = File.ReadAllText(@"D:\sample.txt",Encoding.UTF8); System.Console.WriteLine(textFileContent); } } }
We have used Encoding.UTF8
of System.Text
to specify the encoding of the file we are reading.
Output
PS D:\workspace\csharp\HelloWorld> dotnet run This is C# Tutorial from www.tutorialkart.com. This is a sample text file.
C# Read Text File – Line by Line
To read a text file line by line using C# programming, follow these steps.
- Import System.IO for function to read file contents.
- Import System.Text to access Encoding.UTF8.
- Use FileStream to open the text file in Read mode.
- Use StreamReader to read the file stream.
- Then we can use while loop to read each line of the text file with StreamReader.ReadLine() function.
Reading a file line by line is really useful if the size of text file is huge.
Program.cs
using System.IO; using System.Text; namespace CSharpExamples { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var fileStream = new FileStream(@"d:\sample.txt", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(fileStream, Encoding.UTF8)) { string line; while ((line = streamReader.ReadLine()) != null) { System.Console.WriteLine("- "+line); } } } } }
Output
PS D:\workspace\csharp\HelloWorld> dotnet run - This is C# Tutorial from www.tutorialkart.com. - This is a sample text file.
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Conclusion
In this C# Tutorial, we learned to read a file’s content as a whole and store it in a string or read the file line by line.