how to insert row in first line of text file?

Question

I have a test file that contains

1,2,3
2,3,4
5,6,7

I want to insert this into the first line: A,B,C

So that I get:

Answer 1

Late to the party...

Good question. You can use this code:

static void WriteABC2(string filename)
{
    string tempfile = Path.GetTempFileName();
    using (var writer = new FileStream(tempfile, FileMode.Create))
    using (var reader = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open))
    {
        var stringBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("A,B,C" + Environment.NewLine);
        writer.Write(stringBytes, 0, stringBytes.Length);

        reader.CopyTo(writer);
    }
    File.Copy(tempfile, filename, true);
    File.Delete(tempfile);
}

This code is based on the excellent Jake answer, but I use FileStream instead of StreamWriter and StreamReader. There are big performance improvements (even 4X faster from my test) using FileStream when big files are processed. Just to be a little clear, I made some test and I reported the results below.

How I made tests

I created 7 files. Each file contains 10^X lines and its name is file.txt. So the list of the files is:

| File name       | Line count | File size |
|-----------------|------------|-----------|
| file1.txt       |          1 | 66 byte   |
| file10.txt      |         10 | 678 byte  |
| file100.txt     |        100 | 6,72 KB   |
| file1000.txt    |       1000 | 68,2 KB   |
| file10000.txt   |      10000 | 692 KB    |
| file100000.txt  |     100000 | 6,85 MB   |
| file1000000.txt |    1000000 | 69,5 MB   |

Each line of each file is composed as follows:

 - abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789

For example, the first two lines of file10.txt are:

0 - abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789
1 - abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789

I used the below code to make tests and to get the function execution duration:

var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();

long abcTotalDuration = 0;
long abc2TotalDuration = 0;

string fileInput = "file1.txt";
string outputFolder = "output";

for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
{
    string filename1 = Path.Combine(outputFolder, Guid.NewGuid().ToString());
    string filename2 = Path.Combine(outputFolder, Guid.NewGuid().ToString());

    stopwatch.Restart();
    WriteABC(fileInput, filename1);
    stopwatch.Stop();
    abcTotalDuration += stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds;

    stopwatch.Restart();
    WriteABC2(fileInput, filename2);
    stopwatch.Stop();
    abc2TotalDuration += stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds;

    File.Delete(filename1);
    File.Delete(filename2);
}

Console.WriteLine("ABC : " + abcTotalDuration.ToString());
Console.WriteLine("ABC2: " + abc2TotalDuration.ToString());

// Just to wake me up :-)
Console.Beep(800, 1000);

Console.ReadKey();

The test consists of prepending A,B,C(new line) for each specified file. The result is saved in separate file (only for test).

I launched the code 5 times for each input file (specified in fileInput variable). WriteABC and WriteABC2 functions are executed 100 times each every time I launch the code.

Here are the results (all in ms):

Processing file1.txt

      | ABC | ABC2 |
      |-----|------|
      | 285 |  305 |
      | 356 |  352 |
      | 435 |  371 |
      | 355 |  313 |
      | 362 |  372 |
|-----|-----|------|
  AVG | 359 |  343 |
|-----|-----|------|

---

Processing file10.txt

      | ABC | ABC2 |
      |-----|------|
      | 256 |  251 |
      | 273 |  323 |
      | 355 |  347 |
      | 350 |  314 |
      | 315 |  286 |
|-----|-----|------|
  AVG | 310 |  304 |
|-----|-----|------|

---

Processing file100.txt

      | ABC | ABC2 |
      |-----|------|
      | 247 |  253 |
      | 239 |  246 |
      | 357 |  353 |
      | 387 |  334 |
      | 333 |  329 |
|-----|-----|------|
  AVG | 313 |  303 |
|-----|-----|------|

---

Processing file1000.txt

      | ABC  | ABC2  |
      |------|-------|
      |  977 |   924 |
      |  784 |   738 |
      |  818 |   764 |
      | 1142 |  1101 |
      |  975 |   903 |
|-----|------|-------|
  AVG |  939 |   886 |
|-----|------|-------|

---

Processing file10000.txt

      | ABC  | ABC2  |
      |------|-------|
      | 1150 |   748 |
      | 1147 |   811 |
      | 1069 |   654 |
      | 1181 |   799 |
      | 1234 |   805 |
|-----|------|-------|
  AVG | 1156 |   763 |
|-----|------|-------|

---

Processing file100000.txt

      | ABC  | ABC2  |
      |------|-------|
      | 5485 |  1769 |
      | 5268 |  1528 |
      | 5296 |  1555 |
      | 5308 |  1529 |
      | 5289 |  1553 |
|-----|------|-------|
  AVG | 5329 |  1587 |
|-----|------|-------|

---

Processing file1000000.txt

      | ABC   | ABC2   |
      |-------|--------|
      | 49034 |  12633 |
      | 52116 |  12484 |
      | 51643 |  12109 |
      | 52022 |  12359 |
      | 53145 |  12716 |
|-----|-------|--------|
  AVG | 51592 |  12460 |
|-----|-------|--------|

The difference becomes remarkable from file10000.txt.