Question

I am looking for the best way to read a CSV file line by line. I want to know what are the most efficient ways of doing the same. I am particulary concerned when the size of the file is big. Are the file reading utilities avilable in the .NET classes the most effient?

(PS: I have searched for the word ‘Efficient’ to know if someone has already posted similar question before posting this.)

Answer 1

You can try this: fast CSV Parser.

Here’s the benchmark result:

To give more down to earth numbers,
with a 45 MB CSV file containing 145
fields and 50,000 records, the reader
was processing about 30 MB/sec. So all
in all, it took 1.5 seconds! The
machine specs were P4 3.0 GHz, 1024
MB.