C# Data Access: Text Files 

Thank you so much. The professor I have never makes us code, He always give us a power point presentation and send us home with a lab. It is nice to see someone who takes the time and explain us the code behind the theory.

Can't belive it! 80% of my work is based on text files, move it, make logs about the actions taken, update, read it to valid them, awesome Tim, you get a great way to teach. I am your Fan!! Its pure gold. Thanks so much!

I can't believe how helpful this actually was. I'm actually mind blown by how you managed to convey so much information and clear up a lot of my question so simply. thank you very very much. You're a blessing to humankind

EXTREMELY helpful. I have been seating at my laptop for 3 hours trying to find how to read and write from text files to make a log-in interface and nothing helped me, except this beauty. Much appreciated!

0:00 - Intro 0:54 - Creating Demo Console App 1:39 - File path: string literal explained 2:51 - Reading from text file 5:00 - Writing to text file 7:07 - Populate DataModel fields form text file: 9:33 - • Line split 12:20 - • String interpolation 15:24 - Note on data validation when reading form text file 17:45 - Adding object to a list: 18:47 - • Anonymous instance explained 19:45 - List of DataModel to text file 23:22 - Summary and concluding remarks

Tim, that was So well explained!!! Just learning C# in past week after VBA. Storing data is key. You’ve shown me how easy this is and also to understand what’s happening. Thank You!!!

Amazing! Informative, clear and useful information! Please continue to make these great videos, I appreciate them and thank you for your time in making them!

Reading from and writing to text files has come in very handy to me. Thank you, Tim! :) I've been doing access and security system upgrade at work for a client. Database form old system was not compatible with the new system, although it was the same manufacturer... So only option was to re-configure whole system by hand. Lucky for me, old system had a feature to print out programming as csv files. And new system could take csv in. Only problem was that text files needed to be cleaned up and needed some other work and many manipulations to be usable. Now with C# I've been flying through text files containing thousands of lines like it was nothing. Filtering, rearranging, creating new lists and other stuff. New system was ready in no time. So to speak... These basic techniques has really made my life easier. To give you some kind of reference - we don't use computer programming at work. We work with hardware. Installation and service. Electronics. To use C# at work is like using some kind of space age technology. Very exciting! One may argue, that you could use excel for working with csv... I'd say - excel is limited thou. You can't do stuff with excel like you can with C#. With C# it's freedom. Thank you!

First of all thanks for refresher. Sometimes if you get lost in c# thing become really complicated than they should be. This is an old video but still so relevant. I just fixed some of my code after watching it. Your video never fail to deliver. I really appreciated your efforts. 👍

Tim Great Video. New items make it far clearer.

Like the way you explain things. You just got a new subscriber. Definetely will watch more!

Chuckles. Just keep standing on that "soapbox". The Gospel you sing is very informative and good learning! So don't give up on it, mate.

This was an extremely helpful tutorial! Thank you so much for posting this!

Thanks Tim. Great tutorial, very clear and concise as with the rest of your tutorials. Keep up the good work!

Thank you alot, that was the type of tutorial that I needed

I'm struggle to build a "practising app" when learn C#, don't know how to get data to excute and then save back to. Text file absolutely is easy way. Your video help me much. Hope I've learnt more from your database turorial. Thanks.

Thank you , your list of string method is very elegant. List processing has come of age compared to multidimensional arrays, which are fine if your a string theory physicist used to thinking in multi dimensions.

Thank you! Simple and to the point, thank you very much! I just subscribed just because of this one video.

thx for the videos, I like that u go in-depth on one particular thing.

Nice Video Timothy! Thanks

thank you sir. I spent the whole day manipulating data with jugged arrays, I am giving lists a try.

this video helped me alot, very useful, clear and simpel information. Thanks alot Tim :)

One of the best tutorials ever!!

Thank u so much sir for making concepts this much simple and effective... i appreciate ur effort for these tutorials...

Awesome and clean explanations especially for us beginners, wish to see more tutorial on delegates, reflection, dependency injection, rest services, more in-depth on unit testing, web api and asp.net mvc

That is the easiest and clearest I have ever seen that explained.

Very good, professional work. Thank you for your effort. Please, continue .....

Awesome video, very clear for a non-native english speaker.

Thank you Tim, love your exposition

Thank you, I liked and subscribed to your channel! just what I needed to expand my knowledge

Wow, you really know what you're doing. Great tutorial!

Great video Timothy! You make it so easy to understand.if you can...Could you please make a video on how to validate data in a List?Like how would you check if a new Person you are trying to add is already on the List?Thank you

You are a godsend, sir. I love your videos. The 18 people that thumbs downed should be ashamed of themselves.

Thanks for the video... Nice presentation.

Finally a programmer with common sense who can teach! Thanks!

So exceptionally great! Thanks for all your awesome videos! :D

thank you :)

great one.I love the way you are explaining things.Thanks

Amazing content. Thank you!

Great video. If you can add more error handling checking, it is very helpful. Thank you!

Very informative. Thanks.

This is what I needed thanks!

Thank you! Very helpful tutorial

You my sir are a life saver thanks :)

Great video, clear explain.

Clear explanation. Subbed

Great tutorial !!. Thank you so much Sr.

Hi, Thanks for this video .

Wow! Nice, thanks a lot!

Thank You Tim for all your content, please can you create a tutorial about XML Serialization and Deserialization in C#

Damn, so its called spring interpolation now everything popped up on google, these keyword are really tricky. Thanks for the tutorial.

Wow didnt know about interpolated strings ($"") being faster than " "+"..." Etc.This i will use in the future even for convenience and perfrmance gain.Thanks!

awesome teacher thank u

ty i studied a lot

thx SO much for this, big ups to yourself

I believe this is what Facebook used to store plain text passwords. They probably watched your video and thought, "Hey, we can save time by not hashing password in a database, it will be quick." Brilliant.

U R Amazing man ,thank u from Idlib and wish u be in All Fine thinks because U R Powerfull Teacher

Thx, good video helpful.

That was very helpful

Hey Tim, love your videos. They've really helped me get information in and out of a file. One thing I'm unsure of though, is how to do you overwrite data after variables have been changed during an apps use? Would it just be a case of clearing the file before you save your data again?

This is nice, very informative... Thanks Tim... I just want to know if one entries has comma character, what happen if I use comma as delimeter...

Great video. Is this the same as serialization? It would be great if you could do a video on XML, JSON, and other types of serialization. Also, how to read and apply a configuration file. Keep up the great work!

great vid!!

VERY NICE!

I found this tutorial pretty helpfull . In the last 3 years of me coding , i have not been able to make a High score system in the games i have worked on =)

Thank you very much!!

Old video but to a an old programmer updating my skills it's gold. It re-writes the file each time. Thinking of huge text files 500MB to 1GB it would probably take forever to save. Thinking of changing it to only update the changed lines, what would you recommend I research C# wise?

Thank you!

Thnx sir. Your teaching methods good. Please create a video on firebird database connectivity with c sharp

Finally it worked! Thank you!!!

Awesome vidio thank so much. But how do I search for specific line(person) then remove it? Thank u so much

good presentation

Hi, nice video. Just a quick question - is there a way to print to the console only one list item (eg. line 9 in the FirstName list)?

So what is the benefit or difference of using FIle.ReadAllLines, File.WriteAllLines compared to using StreamReader, StreamWriter?

Just awesome

very useful. However my output file will be hundreds of lines long. Reading it in as a list, adding one line and then writing it out will take up too much time. I need to just append/add to the file by adding a new line. Any thoughts?

How would you access just one variable out of the object? Like say I wanted the last name of the third person?

thank you very muchhhh

First of all, Thank you VERY much for your free, comprehensive videos!! I cant say how much they have helped me. I have a question that have been researching and could not find the answer for it. I have a program that generates a text file and I want to create report based on that text file. I have found Microsoft report viewer but I am not sure how to use it with my text file. I dont want to pass the whole text file to the report viewer, rather pass some parts of it and create a table out of it in my report. I would greatly appreciate any help.

thanks dude

No matter where I place the file, and write the file path EXACTLY as i have it structured, the compiler will not find the file and runs an exception. I cant seem to find anything about how to fix this online. EDIT: Pretty sure that it was reading the file "Test.txt" as "Test.txt.txt". When i removed the ".txt" part of the file name, the program compiled normally. I found that solution on stackoverflow and it helped out. Anyways, it was a naming problem on my end. Sorry for the mix up and thanks for the tutorials :)

Cool thing. Thanks

very impressive and outstanding explanation Can i ask is this can be used as data base from that text file?

"Assuming is the mother of all problems when it comes to programming" -The best quote of all times

Hey Tim, what's the difference between using a streamwriter/reader or just simply using File.(...) ? Both can achieve the same thing. And thanks for the videos, great help!

I'm curious what you would recommend if one wanted their application to save individual files in the same manner as Excel with .xlsx, Word with .docx or Acrobat with .pdf. I believe some of these formats are simply XML documents, which is just a fancy text file, is it not? I'm currently looking at using JSON to create my "own" file format. Wondering if you have thoughts and/or suggestions for this approach. As always, thanks!

Hello, what is the best way to extract text from PDF or Docx files?

Hi Tim, what if two fields in the text file are numbers and you wanted to calculate the sum of the two numbers in a new field then output that into the same text file?

Have you used TextFieldParser in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO namespace? Also there is CsvHelper NuGet package. Thanks for your videos.

I have a question. If i wanted to access, for example, greg jones lastname, and change it to a new lastname, or for that matter any variable, how would i achieve that? As far as i know, list have index to access, but can i make it so, that all person also has ID variable, that is stored in the text file, and use that ID to get all the content of that particular line, and then do stuff with that line person information. Hope it makes sense.

Very informative video helped me out a lot, but I have a question. Is there a way to pass text from the file into a 2D array. so each comma represents a column, and line represents a row to make up a table. i.E mammals, Dogs, cats, horses, Platypus Fish, Clownfish, Salmon, Crayfish, Tuna Birds, Parrots, Pigeons, Sparrows, Penquin The point is to make an easy way to randomly choose a category and then display the elements within it.

Hi awesome video helped me a lot already but how do i handle the problem, when i only know what my 5 first columns are and after that i can have unlimited more columns? So i know my first couple columns are name, last name, street, etc. and after that i get for every file i want to load a different amount of columns that i dont know anything about.

When creating csv files, do I need to avoid strings that have a comma in them? Or is there a trick to it?

Hi Tim, Thank you for your videos. What happens when a new object is created in a for/foreach loop? Is the first object reused? If not, then on a larger scale could creating objects in for/foreach loops produce clutter in the program, and what could be done to avoid that? The first thing I think of is creating a placeholder instance of an object outside of a loop that the can be accessed, using it to hold temporary values. It also dawned on me to possibly add a number at the end of each instance being created within the loop so each instance has a unique name. Am I over thinking this? I would like to know how this is functioning on as low-level as I can.

Hello, Tim. this video's really helpful to me. By the way, I used to used StreamWriter and StreamReader to handle text data. ( with using keyword). is there difference between File class and StreamWriter class? Thank u in advance.

Dear Timothy, I had to use the following syntax for displaying people using foreach loop, since my VS2010 does not support the $ format: Console.WriteLine( "{0} {1} {2}", person.FirstName, person.LastName, person.URL ); However, trying to use the same format for writing the fields back to the file as a single string confuses me: output.Add( "{0},{1},{2}", person.FirstName, person.LastName, person.URL ); This doesn't work, as Add takes one argument, and not four. output.Add("{person.FirstName},{person.LastName},{person.URL}"); This doesn't work either, as the same literal strings get written back to the file. I wonder if you could please help me figure out what to do here? Thanks

im a tad bit confused, when using file.WriteAllLines(FilePath, output); shouldnt it write all of the other person instances instead of just writting another greg

Hi Tim! ReadAllLines is not useful if it is a huge file, and we probably need to read it in chunks with an open connection. Can you make a video on that?

Hello, Tim! First of all, thank you for this video, it really helped me out a lot on a project i'm working on. I have a question though. I want to be able to search for the first element in the file and have the program return the rest of the line to me. Here is an example - Die: 747 measurement: 266.7 Notes: Some sample note here. Something like this but I want to search by die, in other words, the first element. Thanks in advance. Best of luck to you.

can I also access one line? for example FirstName from line 2?