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

Yes, whenever you create a disposable object you must dispose of it preferably with a using statement

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

In this case though you can just use the File.ReadAllText method to simplify the expression

variable = File.ReadAllText(file);