Question

I have a file and I need to read it line after line.
Each line ends with “###” and not with the regular end-of-line character (\n).

Is there any way to change the streamReader so when I use the ReadLine() it will read until it sees “###”?
If not, is there another way to do it or should I implement a new class for this purpose?

Answer 1

No, you cannot do this with StreamReader. The StreamReader class is hardcoded to recognize \r and \n characters and it is not configurable. You can see this using .NET Reflector:

char ch = this.charBuffer[charPos];
switch (ch)
{
    case '\r':
    case '\n':
        string str;
        if (builder != null)
        // ...

If your files are not too large you can instead read the entire file into memory and then split on ###. If you need the streaming behaviour then you could write something similar to ReadLineyourself, but with the behaviour you desire.