How to parse a text file with C#

Question

By text formatting I meant something more complicated.

At first I began manually adding the 5000 lines from the text file I\'m asking this question for,into my proje

Answer 1

One way that I've found really useful in situations like this is to go old-school and use the Jet OLEDB provider, together with a schema.ini file to read large tab-delimited files in using ADO.Net. Obviously, this method is really only useful if you know the format of the file to be imported.

public void ImportCsvFile(string filename)
{
    FileInfo file = new FileInfo(filename);

    using (OleDbConnection con = 
            new OleDbConnection("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=\"" +
            file.DirectoryName + "\";
            Extended Properties='text;HDR=Yes;FMT=TabDelimited';"))
    {
        using (OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(string.Format
                                  ("SELECT * FROM [{0}]", file.Name), con))
        {
            con.Open();

            // Using a DataReader to process the data
            using (OleDbDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader())
            {
                while (reader.Read())
                {
                    // Process the current reader entry...
                }
            }

            // Using a DataTable to process the data
            using (OleDbDataAdapter adp = new OleDbDataAdapter(cmd))
            {
                DataTable tbl = new DataTable("MyTable");
                adp.Fill(tbl);

                foreach (DataRow row in tbl.Rows)
                {
                    // Process the current row...
                }
            }
        }
    }
} 

Once you have the data in a nice format like a datatable, filtering out the data you need becomes pretty trivial.