Reading a text file word by word

Question

I have a text file containing just lowercase letters and no punctuation except for spaces. I would like to know the best way of reading the file char by char, in a way that

Answer 1

First of all: StringReader reads from a string which is already in memory. This means that you will have to load up the input file in its entirety before being able to read from it, which kind of defeats the purpose of reading a few characters at a time; it can also be undesirable or even impossible if the input is very large.

The class to read from a text stream (which is an abstraction over a source of data) is StreamReader, and you would might want to use that one instead. Now StreamReader and StringReader share an abstract base class TextReader, which means that if you code against TextReader then you can have the best of both worlds.

TextReader's public interface will indeed support your example code, so I 'd say it's a reasonable starting point. You just need to fix the one glaring bug: there is no check for Read returning -1 (which signifies the end of available data).