Do I need to explicitly close the StreamReader in C# when using it to load a file into a string variable?

Question

Example:

variable = new StreamReader( file ).ReadToEnd();

Is that acceptable?

Answer 1

You need to Dispose of objects that implement IDisposable. Use a using statement to make sure it gets disposed without explicitly calling the Dispose method.

using (var reader = new StreamReader(file))
{
  variable = reader.ReadToEnd();
}

Alternately, use File.ReadAllText(String)

variable = File.ReadAllText(file);