Question

I need an “idea” on how to read text file data between quotes. For example:

line 1: "read a title"

line 2: "read a descr"

line 1: "read a title"

line 2: "read a descr"

I want to do a foreach type of thing, and I want to read all Line 1’s, and Line 2’s as a pair, but between the “.

In my program I am going to output (foreach of course):

readTerminatedNull(file1);

readTerminatedNull(file2);

I would read line by line, but some of the text could be:

line 1: "read a super long
title that goes off"
line 2: "read a descr"

So that’s why I want to read between the “.

Sorry if that is too complicated, and it’s a little hard to explain.

Edit:
Thanks for all the feed back guys, but I’m not sure you are getting what I am trying to do :p not your faults, I wrote this kinda wierd.

I will have a text file full of refrences, and text. like so.

text inside:

Refren: "myrefrence_1"
String: "This is a string of a refrence"
Refren: "myrefrence_2"
String: "hello world"
Refren: "myrefrence_3"
String: "I like cookies."

I want it to to read myrefrence_1 in the quotes of the first line, and then read the string in the next line between the “.

I will then stuff into my program that matches the refrence with the string.

But sometimes the text will be more than one line.

Refren: "this is text that goes and then
return keys on some parts."

and I still want it to read through the “.

Answer 1

What you’re describing sounds like a single-column CSV file. The easiest way to access that is probably to use the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser class, something like:

using (var csvParser = new TextFieldParser(new StringReader(content))
                             {
                                 Delimiters = new[] {","},
                                 HasFieldsEnclosedInQuotes = true
                             })
{
    while (!csvParser.EndOfData)
    {
        var fields = csvParser.ReadFields();
        Console.Print(fields[0]); //do something with the first (in your case only) field found.
    }
}

Probably the easiest way to determine whether this approach makes sense, is to think about what happens if the string you’re reading actually contains a double quote. Would it end up as "He said ""this is quoted"", but I wasn't listening" (doubling up the quotes), or is this situation impossible?

If the quotes would be doubled up in this way, then a standard CSV reader like this built-in framework one is probably your best bet.