How do you search a large text file for a string without going line by line in C#?

Question

I have a large text file that I need to search for a specific string. Is there a fast way to do this without reading line by line?

This method is extremely slow beca

Answer 1

If you're only looking for a specific string, I'd say line-by-line is the best and most efficient mechanism. On the other hand, if you're going to be looking for multiple strings, particularly at several different points in the application, you might want to look into Lucene.Net to create an index and then query the index. If this is a one-off run (i.e., you won't need to query the same file again later), you can create the index in a temporary file that will be cleaned up automatically by the system (usually boot time; or you can delete it yourself when your program exits). If you need to search the same file again later, you can save the index in a known location and get much better performance the second time around.