Question

I have a flat text file that contains the following data;

Following are the names and ages in a text file.

26|Rachel
29|Chris
26|Nathan

The data is kept on a server (e.g http://domain.com/info.dat), I’d like to read this text file and insert it into an array (age and name). I’d like to ignore the first line (Following are….).

I’ve sorted the code to grab the data file using a webclient and the code to open the dat file using streamreader as follows;

using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(path))
                {
                    while (sr.Peek() >= 0)
                    {
                        string[] channels = Text.Split('|');

                        foreach (string s in channels)
                        {  

                        }
                    }
                }

The problem with the above code is when it comes to inputting it into an array with the correct columns. Could anyone give me some pointers?

Many thanks

Answer 1

How about an answer that uses some LINQ:

var results = from str in File.ReadAllLines(path).Skip(1)
              where !String.IsNullOrEmpty(str)
              let data = str.Split('|')
              where data.Length == 2
              select new Person { Age = Int32.Parse(data[0], NumberStyles.Integer, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture), Name = data[1] };

results is now IEnumerable<Person> which you can do ToList or ToArray on to get a List<Person> or Person[], or you can simply use the results with a foreach loop.

UPDATE: here is the Person class needed to make this more functional.

public class Person
{
   public int Age { get; set; }
   public string Name { get; set; }
}