Question

I have an external dll written in C# and I studied from the assemblies documentation that it writes its debug messages to the Console using Console.WriteLine.

this DLL writes to console during my interaction with the UI of the Application, so i don’t make DLL calls directly, but i would capture all console output , so i think i got to intialize in form load , then get that captured text later.

I would like to redirect all the output to a string variable.

I tried Console.SetOut, but its use to redirect to string is not easy.

Answer 1

As it seems like you want to catch the Console output in realtime, I figured out that you might create your own TextWriter implementation that fires an event whenever a Write or WriteLine happens on the Console.

The writer looks like this:

    public class ConsoleWriterEventArgs : EventArgs
    {
        public string Value { get; private set; }
        public ConsoleWriterEventArgs(string value)
        {
            Value = value;
        }
    }

    public class ConsoleWriter : TextWriter
    {
        public override Encoding Encoding { get { return Encoding.UTF8; } }

        public override void Write(string value)
        {
            if (WriteEvent != null) WriteEvent(this, new ConsoleWriterEventArgs(value));
            base.Write(value);
        }

        public override void WriteLine(string value)
        {
            if (WriteLineEvent != null) WriteLineEvent(this, new ConsoleWriterEventArgs(value));
            base.WriteLine(value);
        }

        public event EventHandler<ConsoleWriterEventArgs> WriteEvent;
        public event EventHandler<ConsoleWriterEventArgs> WriteLineEvent;
    }

If it’s a WinForm app, you can setup the writer and consume its events in the Program.cs like this:

    /// <summary>
    /// The main entry point for the application.
    /// </summary>
    [STAThread]
    static void Main()
    {
        using (var consoleWriter = new ConsoleWriter())
        {
            consoleWriter.WriteEvent += consoleWriter_WriteEvent;
            consoleWriter.WriteLineEvent += consoleWriter_WriteLineEvent;

            Console.SetOut(consoleWriter);
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Application.Run(new Form1());
        }
    }

    static void consoleWriter_WriteLineEvent(object sender, Program.ConsoleWriterEventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.Value, "WriteLine");
    }

    static void consoleWriter_WriteEvent(object sender, Program.ConsoleWriterEventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.Value, "Write");
    }